A Study Of Online Knowledge And Perceived Utility On Search Performance

Information is the foundation of consumer brand choice and purchase decision. There is a high theoretical and practical value in studying consumer's information behavior, thus it has a long research history in this field. With the development of the internet, more and more people are using it in daily lives, it has changed people's patterns of life a lot, brought giant information and a new way of information acquisition. This study aims at finding out the factors that influence consumer's information search effect in online circumstance, suggests the structured equation model of online information search effect, and test the model in an empirical research.First, I define the study area. After the literature review of both online and offline channels, the main part of my research is the external search of consumer information acquisition, and what factors will impact the effect of online consumer information search in a behavioral or psychological perspective. Then I suggest that product knowledge, online search experience, perceived usefulness of online information, perceived risk of online information and demographics are the main factors that influence online information search effect. And online information search effect constitute of online information search amount and online information search quality.Second, I make a survey of consumer searching information of mobiles before they make the purchase decision. Through visiting schools companies and some street sample surveys, I collect about 300 questionnaires of people who had online information seeking experience before they bought a mobile, with age from 15 to 40. Then I use SPSS in analyzing the data and make a test of liability and validity. After that, I establish a structure equation model in Lisrel and got a good result in model fit. In order to make it better in the meaning, I make some modifications to the model and finally have a model with a good data result and a clear meaning.Third, according to the result, consumer's product knowledge, online search experience and educational background are the three main factors that influence online information search quality, I summarize these factors as consumer's online knowledge level; Consumer's perceived usefulness and risks of online information are the two factors that influence online information search amount, I summarize these two factors as the perceived utility of online information search. It is obvious that consumer's online knowledge level determines their search quality, and perceived utility of consumer's online information search determines search amount, while online information search quality and amount together show the effect of consumer online information search. Thus we get the result that consumer's online knowledge level and perceived utility of online information search are the main factors that influence consumer online information search effect...