Internet Network Externalities and Specialized Information Agents

This willingness to pay can be proved as a sufficiently positive value to break through the limitation of the nature of public goods of Internet information. This implies that when the Internet becomes more popular for information transmission and reception, the development of specialized information services will be the indispensable trend. In addition, this study employs a survey to the users through the Internet.

The result of data analysis from the survey shows that the willingness to pay of the individual user to achieve a specific information through specialized information services is still low currently. But the willingness to pay is likely to increase for the individual user in order to avoid the congestion and to compete for the information timing. Thus, examining the theoretical inference with the empirical evidence, the user\'s preference to pay can be extended to the willingness to pay for using specialized information services, which also offers the designing consideration for an efficient pricing mechanism of the Internet usage in the future.