An Empirical Research of Consumer Behavior in Online Pay-for-Knowledge for Chinese College Students

Abstract

In the information age, people learn more and more from internet by knowledge sharing. Zhihu-Live is a commercial application that applied the idea of Pay-for-knowledge in recent years. University students are one of the representative and typical users and it is meaningful to research the evolution process. This paper applied two stage questionnaire to investigate on-line knowledge shopping behavior of college students. The empirical results show that the users do not entirely relay on the innovative way of knowledge learning in real life. Furthermore, it may helpful to analyze users’ browsing habits by big data algorithms and provide better customized service in the future. Keywords—online pay-for-knowledge, consumer behavior, personalized service, Zhihu-live I. RESEARCH BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION In recent years, Internet trend is experiencing rapid development from free-of-charge to payment mode. Around 2016, the emergence of some pay-for-knowledge applications (such as Zhihu-live, Himalaya FM, Fenda, Douban time) brought intense discussion. According to Tencent report, the change from free-to-payment experienced three stages. In first stage, before 2010, most Internet applications were for free. Many knowledgesharing platforms are published in this period, so people can share their knowledge and experience more quickly and broadly. In second stage, payment mode began to emerge. For example, there were some sharing platforms or communities (such as Douban, Baidu zhidao, Baidu baike, Guokr). Knowledge sharing as an International random behavior began to change to commercial behavior. In third stage, after 2006, payment mode turned to charging mode, and new mobile application appeared on the Internet almost every month. Since there is no exact definition for this mode in previous research, after summarizing some characteristics of similar products, this research make a definition, which is “Internet personalized pay-forknowledge mode”. This payment mode is a recent rising mode and there are few researches about personalized pay-for -knowledge mode. Related reports only care about the data and they only show the superficial phenomenon of how application users’ number changed and how the consumers transform their attitude toward this. They neglect the reasons behind the phenomenon and the specific characteristics of knowledge sharing in this period. This research will try to explain why this mode developed quickly using the factors of information age, knowledge-based economy, UGC and dissemination of knowledge. Previous research mainly focused on all users rather than any specific group. As college students are the typical group who are eager to obtain knowledge and can adopt new applications easier than other users, so they are one of the main targeted group of these application and their attitudes play an important role in how this mode will develop. To fill up this vacancy, this research mainly focused on college student group. Firstly, we carry the first stage survey about how much college students learn about this mode. Then, we investigate their evaluation after using it. Finally, we make conclusions. II. LITERATURE REVIEW From the view of economy, management and communication sciences, research uses following factors to explain why this mode becomes popular. First of all, cognitive surplus. Clay Shirk (2011) put forward a concept named cognitive surplus in his book Cognitive Surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age [2]. It points out that people who get well educated and have power to control spare time tend to have strong inventive to share their ideas. When the free time controlled by different people is gathered together, it can cause knowledge spill-over. Nowadays, the development of social software facilities cooperation among people, so more and more people spend their spare time on creating behavior rather than only consumption. Moreover increasing well-educated people are willing to join the group to share their knowledge. Corresponding Author: Regina Fangying Lin, School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China. Fund Project: the Research project “Applied spatial econometrics and big data technology on behavior economic and urban agglomeration studies (Project Number HA11409051)” at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) from Shenzhen Government for its financial assistance. International Conference on Pedagogy, Communication and Sociology (ICPCS 2019) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 315