Empirical Research On Members' Participation In Virtual Communities

VCs have appealed to a great amount of people, and become the platform for people to communicate. Meanwhile, the huge user base and the abundant user-generated content in VCs are valuable to e-commerce. Members' participation in VCs is fundamental to the development of VCs. Depending on a well understanding of members' participation, VC providers could improve the service quality and the utilization of the resources of VCs. This dissertation proposes four potential research questions, and then uses related theories to investigate the members' participation in terms of knowledge sharing, purchasing, continuance of technology and privacy disclosure, involved in these questions.This dissertation introduces sense of belonging to explain members' stickiness to VCs, and finds that sense of belonging affects members' intentions to get and share knowledge in commercially oriented VCs. Sense of belonging is found to be positively related to the three dimensions of social capital in the VC-familiarity with members in the VC from the structural dimension, perceived similarity with other members from the cognitive dimension, and trust in other members from the relational dimension. It also mediates the relationships between social capital factors and VC members' intentions to participate, indicating that social capital factors exert influences on member participation through enhancing their sense of belonging.This dissertation proposes the mechanism that transfers VC members to consumers through building trust among VC members, which is confirmed to positively influence consumers' purchase decision-making process. The empirical results indicate that, familiarity, perceived similarity, structural assurance and trust propensity are important antecedents of trust in VC members. Such trust could help establish members' trust in VC providers or merchants, and these two kinds of trust further influence members' intention to get information from VCs and intention to purchase from VC providers or merchants.This dissertation introduces the concept of interactivity into the context of micro-blogging service, and finds that perceived interactivity positively influences users' satisfaction and continuance intention. This study also finds that in the phase of post-adoption, strategies used by micro-blogging service providers to extend network externalities, in terms of direct network externalities (perceived network size) and indirect network externalities (perceived complementarity) could enhance users' perceived interactivity, which is comprised of four dimensions, i.e., control, playfulness, connectedness and responsiveness.This dissertation proposes the model of privacy disclosure in location-based social networking service (LBSNS), and finds that LBSNS users' intention to disclose location-related information is influenced by their perceived cost and perceived benefits. Meanwhile, privacy intervention approaches used by LBSNS websites could effectively impact these cost or benefit perception. The results imply that, perceived benefits, including personalization and connectedness, positively influence disclose intention, while perceived cost, which is represented by privacy concern, negatively influences disclose intention. Finally, privacy intervention approaches used by LBSNS websites in enhancing users' perception of justice, including incentives provision, interaction promotion, privacy control, and privacy policy, could enhance members' benefit perception and reduce cost perception.