Consumer Acceptance Of Digital Spiritual Products

Currently, with the demand for spiritual products increasing drastically, studies concerning the consumer behavior of spiritual products have become one of the latest research trends. After defining and characterizing the spiritual products and their features in production and consumption process, this thesis defines the online games as one of the typical spiritual product. With the rapidly growing popularity of online games, and the significant influence they have exerted on the teenagers, together with a lack of study into this subject matter, this thesis attempts to undertake empirical studies on the adoption behavior of online games and arrives at the following tentative conclusions. First, an in-depth theoretical analysis of the spiritual products has revealed that they have unique features in terms of production cost, factos of production, production scale and market supply curve. Meanwhile a further study into the market demand curve indicates that there exists a partial increase in marginal utility. Those spiritual products existed on the Internet are called digital spiritual products. As a typical digital spiritual product, the consumption behavior of online games is under the influence of the features of the products themselves, consumers'motivations and therir experience, and the reference groups'behaviors.Second, this thesis proposes a theoretical model using the three variables of perceived enjoyment, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use to explain why Chinese college students play online games. Then this study conducts a large-scale survey to validate this model. The results have confirmed that the players'motivations and perceived ease of use significantly determines the gamers'behavioral intention, among which perceived ease of use has the strongest prediction power. Besides, the study supports that there is a positive significant correlation between the three variables. Furthermore, the gamer experience positively moderates the relationship beween the perceived enjoyment and behavioral intention, the perceived ease of use and behavioral intention. Third, this study explores the effect of flow experience on the players'perceptions and behavioral intention. According to the data analysis, flow can be classified into two distinct factors: telepresence and concentration. Both factors mediate the relationship between the players'perceptions and behavioral intention. Specifically, perceived usefulness directly determines behavioral intention, while flow has a mediating role on the path between users'perceptions and behavioral intention. Telepresence partly mediates perceived enjoyment and behavioral intention, whereas concentration totally mediates this path. Cosequently, consumers'experience plays a key role in the adoption behavior of spiritual products.Finally, this study investigates the effect of social influence on the adoption behavior of online games. Based on a robust literature review and in-depth interview, this study develops a new scale of social influence and classifis it into two opposite factors: the normative influence and the informative influence. Results from the questionnaire indicate that the normative influence has a significantly negative effect on the players'motivations, while the informative influence positively enhances the motivations and behavioral intention. Furthermore, the user's experience of game play has a moderating effect on the social influence and motivations and behavioral intention.