Understanding and Predicting Students' Intention to Pay for Private Cloud Storage Services

Sammanfattning: Date: 05 June 2017 Level: Bachelor Thesis in Business Administration, 15 ECTS Institution: School of Business, Society and Engineering, Mälardalen University Authors: Meier, Philip Soltani, Nazila Khodabandeloo (88/03/11) (93/07/05) Title: Understanding and Predicting Students’ Intention to Pay for Private Cloud Storage Services Tutour: Konstantin Lampou Keywords: cloud storage service, iCloud, technology acceptance model, information systems, user acceptance, intention to pay Research Question: What are students’ intention to pay for private cloud storage services and why? Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ intention to pay for private cloud storage services, in order to find out how willing they are to pay for such services and for what reasons. Method: This study takes a qualitative approach, where both primary and secondary data are collected. Secondary data was collected through i.e. empirical studies and annual publications. Primary empirical data was conducted through semi-structured interviews with 21 students of Mälardalen University. The primary empirical data was analysed using a thematic analysis. Conclusion: Conducting this study showed, that most of the factors’ influences on students’ intention to pay for private cloud storages were positive, resulting in an overall high willingness to pay. The perceived monetary sacrifice was regarded as very low, hence not preventing potential customers from paying for the services. Considerable issues were however found in the perceived quality, more precisely in the perceived reliability and the lack of trust expressed in private cloud services. Finally, unused potential for private cloud service providers to positively influence students’ attitudes was found both in the perceived usefulness and subjective norm factors.