Research On The Driving Mechanism Of User Payment Behavior In Online Reading Platform

With the rapid development of the Internet and information technology,the way of reading has changed profoundly.The way of reading is gradually shifting from traditional reading to digital reading.The changes in reading patterns,the enhancement of copyright awareness for digital content and the popularization of mobile payment technology had led to the emergence of paying for products on online reading platforms.Although the market of paid for content is huge,online reading platforms are facing the dilemma that the percentage of users willing to pay is low.Therefore,how to guide users to pay for products and improve their stickiness on reading platforms has become an urgent problem to be solved.However,most existing researches have investigated the influence of factors on the behaviors of online reading platforms’ users in isolation,mainly from the perspective of management,marketing and psychology.In addition,most existing researches ignored the dynamic process of behavior changes in the time dimension,and could not explain the formation mechanism of the behavior of users paid for online reading platforms.In order to open the black box of the driving mechanism of user payment behavior in online reading platform,the thesis combined philosophical perspective of critical realism and Bourdieu’s practical theory to explore the structural factors and driving mechanism of user payment behavior.In the stage of exploring the structural factors,the study adopted the grounded theory and conducted an exploratory research through semi-structured interviews.In the stage of revealing the driving mechanism,the study adopted the system dynamics simulation method for confirmatory research.The results show that the forming process of user payment behavior on online reading platform is essentially the process that users form new capital structures by practice and construct their new habitus.The formation of user payment behavior is mainly driven by three kinds of capital and habitus.In the stage of capital constructing habitus,the main driving factors can be divided into three categories:(1)The driving factors of economical capital include rewards,cost of acquisition,payment convenience and perceived risk;(2)The driving factors of cultural capital include knowledge reserve,cultural literacy,achievement motivation and consciousness of responsibility;(3)The driving factors of social capital include user generated content,relationship building,reciprocity and identity.In the stage of habitus guiding user behavior and practice,the main driving factors include habit,reading sense and capital construction.Based on this,the study puts forward four specific management suggestions from the perspective of platform operators.In the following studies,questionnaire survey can be adopted to make the correlation between variables clearer and more accurate,and then the dynamic mechanism of user’s payment behavior can be revealed more accurately by combining with the system dynamics modeling method.Researchers can also explore the behavior pattern from the perspective of user’s resistance to payment.