An Empirical Study of Technology Diffusion on the Internet using Bass Model

Bass 모형을 이용한 인터넷에서의 기술 확산에 대한 실증분석

The Internet possesses not only features of mass media but also features of word of mouth communication. Communication channel is considered as one of most important variables in diffusion process. In this paper, we examined functionality of technology diffusion on the Internet through the use of meta tags. We have measured the coefficients of the Bass diffusion model which has been well-established in new product diffusion. This research shows that the Bass model is appropriate for describing technology diffusion on the Internet. The external influence as represented by the coefficient of innovation was found to be much smaller while the internal influence dominates in all meta tag diffusion. In meta tag diffusion, the internal influence as represented by the coefficient of imitation was increased at least twice bigger than that of consumer durables and information technology. Collecting necessary data in social sciences research can be a burden. This research shows that it can be alleviated through the use of software agents over the Internet. The research made use of software agents for collecting longitudinal data from publicly accessible archive such as Archive.org.