Consumers’ perceptions of the environmental and public health benefits of last mile drone delivery

ABSTRACT

Using Technology Acceptance Model, Theory of Planned Behavior, and Privacy Calculus as theoretical frameworks, this study examined environmental and public health/safety dispositions and environmental and public health/safety benefits, perceived usefulness, privacy risk, and trust as they relate to U.S consumers intention to adopt drone delivery services. This study employed Partial Least Squares – Structural Equation Modeling methods and data were collected online using Amazon Mechanical Turk, resulting in 687 respondents. The results show that the intention to use drones for delivery increases if consumers perceive drone delivery to be useful. Additionally, perceived usefulness was influenced by a person’s environmental and public health/safety dispositions along with related benefits. Additionally, as a person’s perceived usefulness increases their perceived privacy risk decreases. Further, this study found that organisational trust moderates the negative effect of privacy risk on drone adoption.

KEYWORDS:

• Disposition
• drones
• environment
• last mile delivery
• public health

Data availability statement

The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research supporting data is not available.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).