User perception on Location Based Services: The more you know, the less you are willing to pay?

This paper describes the results of an electronic user survey with 118 volunteer participants, conducted between December 2012 and January 2014 and focusing on users´ perception on Location Based Services (LBS) and their use of mobile devices in the context of personal navigation and navigation-related applications. The users are first classified into several user classes according to their Objective and Subjective Knowledge in the field of wireless positioning. Then, the user preferences with respect to various LBS aspects, such as cost and feature preferences, are analyzed per user class. In addition, the user classes are compared according to Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon and Fligner-Policello statistical tests in order to find out if their differences in the LBS preferences are statistically significant. The main finding is that the users belonging to the classes with higher objective knowledge in the field of wireless localization techniques and technologies are generally less willing to pay for enhanced localization approaches and for location based services on their mobile phones than the users with lower technical knowledge.