무료 컨텐츠를 통한 온라인 정보중간상의 신호전송에 관한 연구

One of the most interesting phenomena in the Internet era is the emergence of “Infomediaries” in the form of Internet referral services. The competitiveness of infomediaries depends on possessing high quality information about consumers and vendors. However, obtaining high quality information about consumers is difficult because consumers are not willing to release private information, unless there are strong potential benefits from doing so. So, it is one of the most urgent problems for the infomedaries to persuade consumers to release their private information voluntarily. Therefore, the main problem of the infomedary, the informed party about their own service capability, is to be how to efficiently show the consumers, the uninformed party, the evidence that she has enough service capability to bring about strong potential benefit to them.In this paper, we try to solve the infomediaries’ problem based on the signaling theory, which is well known to be most suitable for analyzing an information asymmetry problems between informed party and uninformed party. We assume the existence of two types of infomediaries: the high type possesses extensive information on high quality vendors so it is able to provide consumers with greater benefit from possible trade, while the low type possesses narrow information on vendors so the expected benefit is low.We also model the infomediary as sending signal of its type through free contents and consumers as receiving that signal. In our model, free contents act as a key instrument for reaching and inducing consumers to visit the infomediary’s site. In the complete information case, we show that the high type infomediary selects optimal level of free contents based on its cost and benefit. In the incomplete information case, the high type selects a higher level of free contents in order to signal its type. This research is one of the early studies on the signaling behavior in the online context. This study is differentiated from previous signaling research in that the former focuses on online context but the latter mainly focus on offline context. The major contribution of this study is the finding and verifying of the possibility of existence of new signaling instrument, free contents, which is usable online. We show that free contents may be not only a simple marketing tool to attract consumers but also a signaling instrument of hidden capability of the infomediary. The results of this study may be applied to the diverse cases of online business players like online shopping malls, portals as well as infomediaries themselves. Of course, a few concerns must be considered in generalizing the results of this study. Since the results of this study based on the theoretical analysis only, empirical validity may be limited more or less. So, it may be a possible research topic to validate this study’s results empirically.