Impact of Culture on Mobile Phone Service Adoption and Diffusion: A Cross-country Analysis

In recent years mobile phone service has witnessed a massive surge in diffusion. This diffusion is considered an outcome of economic, political, geographical and cultural factors. Literature review shows that role of cultural factor in mobile phone service diffusion is still understudied. The rate of adoption and diffusion differs considerably across the countries. This study attempts to analyze the impact of national culture on the adoption and diffusion of mobile phone services. For this purpose, the study adopts the mobile penetration data of and uses Hofstede's cultural dimension values across different countries. Based on the Hofstede's cultural dimension values, the countries are categorized into different clusters. Then the coefficient of innovation effect and imitation effect is determined by using Bass diffusion model. Finally a comparison is made among the clusters to infer whether the culturally similar countries have similar adoption and diffusion behavior than culturally dissimilar countries.