Consumer Technology Adoption and Use
How consumers take up AI and digital technologies in steps rather than all at once, what stalls them between one step and the next, and how the technology is used once it has been taken up.
Sohyun Kim, Ph.D.
Senior Researcher
Department of Consumer Science, Seoul National University
I study how consumers take up what is new — technologies, retail and financial services, and sources of information — and how those choices unfold over time.
Technology adoption & use / Consumption environments / Cross-cultural behavior
About
What I work on
I am a consumer scientist at Seoul National University. I study how consumers encounter, evaluate, and eventually take up what is new — new technologies, new retail and financial services, and new sources of information — and how those processes differ across markets and cultures.
My recent work uses secondary and large-scale behavioral data to trace electronic word-of-mouth in retail settings, pairing longitudinal designs with causal-inference methods so that what consumers respond to can be separated from what merely moves alongside it. A parallel line of work follows the adoption and use of emerging technologies, including AI.
Methodology is a research interest in its own right for me. Most of my projects are collaborative — with colleagues across consumer science, marketing, nutrition, and other fields. I also serve as an ISO technical expert on safety services for unmanned stores.
Research
Three questions I keep returning to
Changing Consumption Environments
How shifts in retail formats, household finances, and information environments change what consumers buy, trust, and speak up about.
Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior
How the same brand, product, or platform is read differently depending on the market and culture it lands in.
Selected publications
Recent work
- 2026 Nam, Y., Kim, S., & Park, S. A study on missing data handling in the 1372 consumer counseling data. Journal of Consumer Studies, 37(2), 43–65.
- 2025 Kim, S., & Rha, J. Y. Stepwise technology adoption by consumers: Example of autonomous driving technology. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 109, 860–879.
- 2025 Kim, C., Kim, S., Kil, J. H., & Rha, J. Y. How does culture affect the nature of brand–travel relationships? A cross-country perspective. Journal of International Consumer Marketing, 1–20.
- 2024 Rha, J. Y., Lee, H., Kim, S., & Nam, Y. A study on the relationship between purchases of meal kits and home meal replacements. Nutrition Research and Practice, 18(3), 425–435.
- 2023 Kim, S., Rha, J. Y., & Kim, H. K. Changes in consumer food lifestyles before and after COVID-19 examined through lifelog data. Journal of Consumer Studies, 34(5), 117–141.
In the pipeline
- In prep. Kim, S., Kim, J.-H., & Kim, K.-T. The double burden of intergenerational support for Korean baby boomers: A correlated random effects analysis of life satisfaction.
- In prep. Kim, S., Kim, C. J., & Park, J. Y. Estimating the sales effects of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) using DAG-based causal inference.
- In prep. Kim, S., Rha, J. Y., & Kim, H. K. Changes in consumer social media usage behavior: A latent growth curve modeling analysis (2021–2023).
Teaching
In the classroom
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in consumer psychology, consumer trends, media and consumers, and quantitative methodology, in both English and Korean, at Seoul National University and Chungnam National University. My courses ask students to move from a claim about consumers to the data and design that would actually support it, with a syllabus that keeps pace with the field — currently including a critical examination of LLM-based consumer simulation.