Where does relative advantage collide?

The degree to which an innovation is perceived as better than the idea it supersedes, and by Rogers's own account the strongest of his five perceived attributes of an innovation, alongside compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. Rogers held that relative advantage could be expressed as economic profit, social prestige, convenience, or satisfaction, and that it predicted an innovation's rate of adoption more reliably than any other attribute. Moore and Benbasat operationalised it for information technology in their Perceived Characteristics of Innovating instrument, drawing the relative-advantage items from Davis's usefulness scale because they judged the two to measure the same belief. This is the canonical home of the construct: every other name on this map is a rediscovery of it.[1][2]

Unit

An adopter's perception of an innovation against what it replaces

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Relative-advantage subscale of the PCI; rate of adoption as the criterion

When adoption is modelled at the level of the firm rather than the individual, relative advantage reappears as a driver in the technological context of the technology-organization-environment framework: the perceived benefit of an innovation over current practice, weighed by decision makers on behalf of the organization. Premkumar and Roberts studied rural small businesses adopting online computing, email, and electronic data interchange, and found relative advantage among the significant predictors of adoption across several of those technologies. The referent shifts from a personal job to an organizational process, and the criterion becomes a firm's decision to adopt, but the belief being measured is the same comparison of the new way against the old.[3]

Unit

A firm's perception of an innovation's benefit over current practice

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Relative-advantage items in firm surveys; the organization's adoption decision as the criterion

Relative advantage is not merely similar to the technology acceptance model's perceived usefulness: it is widely treated as the same construct under another name. Davis defined perceived usefulness in 1989 as the degree to which a person believes that using a system would enhance their job performance, a wording that differs from Rogers's only in its comparator, and Moore and Benbasat closed even that gap by adapting their items from his scale. Venkatesh and colleagues made the equivalence explicit in 2003, when they folded relative advantage, perceived usefulness, and four other labels into a single performance expectancy and showed the pooled construct outpredicted each of its parents. This field is the jangle laid bare: three literatures, three names, one belief measured by paraphrased items.[4][5]

Unit

The shared belief behind three model-specific names

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Perceived-usefulness and performance-expectancy scales, item for item close to relative advantage