Consumers who own digital products, such as mobile apps or software, are frequently offered updates to integrate new features. Although delaying an update may lead to non-optimized performance and privacy or security risks, users often hesitate to install available updates. In their current research, Yazhen Xiao (University of Tennesse) and Jelena Spanjol (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) introduce the concept of adoption procrastination and examine why consumers delay adopting what appear to be improvements to already used digital products. The authors take a closer look at the relationship between perceived change, annoyance, anticipated inaction regret and adoption procrastination, as well as the role of perceived benefit and psychological ownership of the digital product. The empirical studies show that users are more likely to be annoyed with an app update that makes a major change to the app and, hence, procrastinate about adoption. As psychological ownership is related to users’ desire to control the product’s status quo, users are more annoyed with changes introduced with an update. These findings are particularly relevant as a longer gap between adoption intention and implementation can slow down market acceptance and in turn negatively influences the product’s success. In order to reduce user procrastination, it is necessary to understand that consumers are often psychologically bonded with digital products. As a result, Xiao and Spanjol recommend that digital product marketers need to reduce users’ sense of loss that accompanies adopting a new digital product version.

You can read more about this research here.