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theses

Purpose: This study seeks to provide a better understanding of how, and in what ways, consumers of digital information are willing to pay for, and thus express their finding of value in, general interest information. Design/Methods/Approach: The study was designed as an experiment with a control group of 100 participants and three treatment groups of 100 participants each. All 400 participants were instructed to select documents from a standard set of ten documents on a general interest topic. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the four groups. The control group viewed all documents as free. The three treatment groups were required to expend money, time or personal data to select documents. The total number of documents selected was calculated for each participant. Quantitative analysis was conducted to assess whether and in what way the expenditures had an effect on the total number selected. Participants were also instructed to select what they considered to be the best document from the set of ten and to supply a short reason for their selection so that the impact of the expenditures on this selection could be analyzed. Findings: 1) There was a significant difference in the mean number of documents selected by the four groups indicating that participants changed their selection patterns depending on the expenditure required. 2) There were no significant correlations between the mean number of documents selected and consumer, demographic or research variables. Consumer variables measured attitudes behavior relating to information and research variables provided participant assessment of the study. This indicates that the treatments were stronger than any tested individual attributes. 3) There were slight differences in the document selected as “best” by the four groups, and the reasons given for the selection of the best document varied slightly among treatment groups. Value/Originality: A better understanding of how consumers value information and what they will exchange for it provides a significant benefit to both producers and consumers. Using different expenditures to test how consumers may change their document selections provided a unique research setting. An interdisciplinary bridge between consumer behavior and human information behavior was enhanced.

ETD_6410

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Barbara Wolf Burton

doi:10.7282/T3BK1F6H

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.