Analyzing e-learning adoption via recursive partitioning

The paper analyzes factors that influence the adoption of e-learning and gives an example of how to forecast technology adoption based on a post-hoc predictive segmentation using a classification and regression tree (CART). We find strong evidence for the existence of technological interdependencies and organizational learning effects. Furthermore, we find different paths to e-learning adoption. The results of the analysis suggest a growing "digital divide" among firms. We use cross-sectional data from a European survey about e-business in June 2002, covering almost 6,000 enterprises in 15 industry sectors and 4 countries. Comparing the predictive quality of CART, we find that CART outperforms a traditional logistic regression. The results are more parsimo-nious, i. e. CARTs use less explanatory variables, better interpretable since different paths of adoption are detected, and from a statistical standpoint, because interactions between the covariates are taken into account.