Factors Influencing Chinese Users’ Willingness to Pay for O2O Knowledge Products Based on Information Adoption Model

Abstract

The China’s knowledge payment industry has entered the “pan-knowledge payment” period, and the overall situation of industry is gratifying. O2O paid knowledge platforms, which are not under the public media spotlight, are also developing slowly. The non-standardized knowledge services provided by this type of platform have a unique charm that standardized online knowledge payment products do not have because they can be personalized and socially interacted on site, and their business value is worthy of attention. The research issue of this paper is what factors influencing users’ willingness to pay can be identified and verified using statistical models from the user behavior and content information available on a typical China’s O2O paid knowledge platform. From the perspective of Information Adoption theory, we construct a model of the factors influencing the willingness to pay for O2O paid knowledge products, which includes two aspects: information quality and source credibility. We collected a total of 9,907 actual behavioral data and topic data from users of the China’s O2O paid knowledge platform, “Zaih.com”, and used log-linear regression model to verify the hypotheses. The results show that: in terms of information quality, content integrity, information relevance, information applicability and interactive empathy have significant positive effects on users’ willingness to pay; in terms of credibility of information sources, the expertise and attractiveness of knowledge providers indicated by integrity of their profile and their high level residence have significant positive effects on users’ willingness to pay. The above findings have important guiding implications for the three parties of O2O knowledge payment, especially for the service improvement and personal development of knowledge providers of this type of platform.