온라인 정보중간상 회원가입시의 소비자 정보비대칭성에 관한 연구

Abstract

As the negative effects of Information-age such as privacy problems, junk mail became

widespread, there has been a new stream of research in marketing that focuses on these

problems. Chu and Kim(2003) proposed a theoretic model which states that corollary

benefitssuch as free email, news, and sometimes monetary payment for providing

information may be a possible signal to solve the consumersinformation asymmetry

problem.

However, despite the importance of empirical validation, there arent enough empirical

studies which test these theoretical predictions. In this paper, we empirically examine the

claim that corollary benefits can be a signal of hidden service capability of an infomediary.

We find that consumers perceive lower level of corollary benefits to be adequate in case of

well-established infomediaries. However, for an unknown infomediary, high level of corollary

benenfit is important to signal capability. These findings are consistent with the predictions

of the Chu and Kims theoretical research(2003).