The Impact of Social Environment on Willingness to Pay for Online Content

Charging subscription fees for content distributed through the Internet has emerged as a commonly adopted business model. This has drawn the attention of academics seeking to understand which factors motivate individuals' willingness to pay for online content. We assert that one important determinant is social influence. For this study, we conceptualized an individual's social environment as consisting of three levels, the micro, meso, and macro levels. We identified constructs existing at each of these levels-satisfaction, peer group preferences, and reputation, respectively-and examined the influence that they exerted on both willingness to pay and on each other in the context of online video games, specifically, massively multiplayer online games. Our results suggested that all levels of social influence play a role in an individual's product valuation process.