Comprehensive Portal Evaluation And Investment Decision Research Based On Users' Behavior

When the number of websites is increasing heavily, what worries us is probably not the indigence of information, but where to go on the Internet because of the richness of information. To comprehensive portals, whose incomes largely lie on the "click-through rate" or the attention resource, how to increase users' using rate or click-through rate is an important issue for them to increase their profit. Therefore, giving a deep look into the factors influencing users' using behavior is not only a key link to increase users' using rate, but also an important step for portal sites to make their investment decision.The objects of this research are major comprehensive portals in China such as sina.com, soho.com and 163.com. By reviewing the widely-used theories and models in the information system area, and combining characters of these portal sites and their users, this research proposed a structure model including main structures of etiquette custom and perceived behavior control. After putting forward structural equation and measurement equation, this paper designs the questionnaire, collects the data from users. Reliability and validity of the questionnaire were tested. By using the analysis software VisualPLS, we get the structural path and factor loading of every manifest variable.The result of the empirical research verified factors we had proposed that influence users' using behavior of portal sites. These factors include behavior attitude, users' etiquette custom and perceived behavior control. These factors influence the behavior intention heavily, and behavior intention is the most significant predictor of behavior. Behavior attitude, one the main factors influencing the behavior intention, is affected by perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, both of which are widely manifested in the Technology Acceptance Model. Besides, users' etiquette custom is a structure refers to a user's own custom, value and others' influence on the user. All of these shape the user's standard by which the user judges, selects and uses a certain portal site. Finally, perceived behavior control explains the objective factors that affect a user's behavior. These objective factors include time, energy, money and so on.Based on the empirical research, this paper constructs an IT investment decision model in the competitive market environment, characterized by the declining IT cost. The main parameter is users' etiquette custom and the aim of both companies in the model is to maximize their own profit. We use the backward induction procedure to derive the subgame-perfect Nash equilibrium in this sequential game. Consequently, we get optimal investment strategies for both companies in the price equilibrium and system quality equilibrium. Finally. matlab7.0 is used for sensibility analysis of the parameters.Quantitative analysis of the model shows that, cost-to-performance ratio declining over time is the main advantage for the later entrant in the market. Meanwhile, the pioneers in the market may enjoy the potential advantage that invests earlier and shapes users' etiquette custom, which is the main barrier to stop users from moving to another portal site. The result of the game of two oligarchs depends on their comparative advantage. The declining IT cost drives the later entrant invests heavily, thus it provides users with higher system qualities and as a result has higher market shares. But when users in the market have high etiquette custom, which means it is not easy for the later entrant to abstract users by providing higher system quality; the pioneer can invest positively to increase its website's quality and maintains its users. The result of this research gives theoretical guidance for the comprehensive portals to seize the opportunities and select correct investment strategies in the competitive market.