An Empirical Research On Users' Acceptance Of Infomediary Based On UTAUT

Recently,Informediaries have begun to thrive all around the world. Google had started to provide online shopping search service by froogle.com in 2002 and changed into google product in 2007, which highlight the service of shopping search. Yahoo.com began to offer product search comparison service in 2003. All of these events show that the flow of infomediaries is coming. In China, informediaries are also developing rapidly, for example, www.fantong.com, www.sofang.com, www.pconline.com and www.51job.com. All of them are the main infomediaries in Chinese internet market.Infomediaries are intermediaries that aggregate information from multiple electronic commerce retailers and provide services of searching and comparison for Internet customers. Specifically, they Provide information, product price comparison, and product recommendation service, and also aid the customers to make the shopping decision. Compared with search engine, infomediaries not only get rid off useless information, but also keep the customers privacy effectively. From the corporation side, infomediaries help companies find their targeted consumers, facilitate transactions and connect buyers and sellers. The perspected future and increasing value of infomedairy ask for a deep study of this new organization. Informediary is always a hot issue. But most of the studies focus on functionality, role, and application of infomediary, seldom take interest in studying the acceptance of infomediary from consumers'perspective. However, the consumers'acceptance is the basis of the informediaries'development and success. Only owning a great many customers, infomediaries can make itself profitable by attracting companies.Therefore, this study makes its framework and hypotheses based on Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to study users'acceptance of infomediary. As a prevailing tool in users'acceptance of Information technology, UTAUT is developed by Technology Acceptance Management (TAM) and other 7 models. Since infomediary is application of information technology, UTAUT can definitely be used as the framework of this empirical research.Based on Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, the framework and hypotheses are formed."Users'acceptance of informedairy"means users'intentions to use and use behaviors. Performance expectation, effort expectation, social influence and facilitating conditions are the 4 main determinants. The study postulates that performance expectation, social influence and effort expectation have an influence on users'behavioral intention significantly, that facilitating conditions affect the use behaviors apparently, and that intentions affect the use behaviors significantly. The study did an empirical research by sending 650 questionnaires, 593 are valid. SPSS13.0 and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) LISREL8.70 are the main tools to do the data descriptive analysis, reliability and validity analysis, fit-indices test, and hypotheses test.The results of the empirical research suggest that performance expect and social influence have an influence significant on users'behavioral intention. Facilitating conditions and behavioral intentions affect the use behaviors significantly. However, effort expectation influence on users'behavioral intention insignificantly. The effect on behavioral intentions brought by performance expect is more than that by social influence The effect on use behaviors brought by facilitation conditions is more than that by performance expectation and than that by social influence. In addition, the present users'acceptance of infomediaries shows that users'intentions are comparative high but use behaviors are low.This study did an empirical research on the users'acceptance of informediaries based on UTAUT. The framework and the measurements can be used in the future research on infomediaries. From a customer's perspective, managers of infomediaries should use effective methods that can affect"Performance Expectation","Social influence"and"Facilitating Conditions"through different media and by all kinds of ways, and finally achieve the goal to increase users'attention and use behaviors, to emplify the customer pool, and to form a base for the deveoplent and the expansion of infomediaries.