A preliminary study of perceived critical mass effect on accepting internet products

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet, Internet products have gradually covered each aspect of lives. It has been becoming a hot issue to study the influential factors of adopting Internet products. Based on summarizing related research of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this paper generalizes the critical mass theory and relevant researches conducted by both foreign and domestic scholars, and analyses the difference and connections between subjective norm, network externality and critical mass. This paper adds perceived critical mass theory to TAM, introducing three factors (individual innovativeness, perceived risk and perceived playfulness) combined with the characteristics of Internet products, and finally constructs a user acceptance model based on Internet products. Furthermore, this paper provides advice for the enterprises' marketing strategies according to the critical mass theory.