THE EFFECTS OF COGNITIVE FEEDFORWARD AND FEEDBACK ON THE PERCEIVED USEFULNESS AND EASE-OF-USE OF COMPLEX MODELS

This paper tailors Davis et al’s (1989) Technology Acceptance Model to the acceptance of complex Management Science/Operations Research (MS/OR) models. Narrowing the focus of TAM to this domain allows the development of explicit, theorized relationships from cognitive feed forward and feedback to perceived usefulness and ease-of-use. This theorized relationship indicates that DSS designers should use feedforward (training) and feedback (intermediate results) to reduce the effort and ambiguity associated with using complex models. A validating survey confirms that training and intermediate outcome measures may be the most useful types of cognitive feedforward and feedback for this problem domain.