DOES COST MATTER: HOW CUSTOMER ADOPTS FEE-BASED ONLINECONTENT SERVICES?

摘要

As Internet usage widely grows, online content services such as newspaper, magazine, music,game and movie are provided with a fee-based subscription. Many content services providersconsider charging a usage fee into its service provisions as one of Internet business models forincreasing revenue. There are customer resistances to adopting the fee-based service provisionon the Web. Previous research in information systems (IS) has focused on the analysis ofadoption of information technology or systems in the individual or organization level. Noprinciple research has been carried out on the user adoption behavior of online content servicesprovisions. As users actively access content services on the Web, it needs to explore useradoption behavior in different settings. Many IS researcher have employed quantitativeapproaches, even though they deal with the process of user behavior regarding the informationtechnology or system. In this study, we attempt to discover how customers adopt the fee-basedprovision of online content services by employing grounded theory, one of the principalqualitative research methods.