The Effects Of Social Influence And Selection On Ties Formation And Persistence In Social Commerce Community

Social commerce is new type of electronic commerce which creates the economic value from the ties and interactions among users with the support of Web 2.0.Extant research has realized the great potential value of social commerce,there is few research exploring the ties formation and persistence of ties among users which is the base of social commerce.This paper explores the dynamic relationship between social interactions and sellers' performance and the drivers of social interactions in the context of social commerce.In study 1,we apply a VAR model to analyze the dynamic relationship between ties formation and sellers,performance.The results show that both unilateral relationships which are based on users' own interests and bilateral relationships which are based on mutual interests can increase the sellers'sales after the ties formation;the pairewise analysis of these two effects shows that the bilateral reciprocated ties have significant stronger effect.In study 2,we explore the two type of drivers of ties emergence among users.The results show that due tothe information asymmetry,the effects of signals or informational factors are positive on buyers with both short and long duration;while the social commerce is not solely informational,the normative effect is also at work on the stage of ties formation.Besides,we also find that the social factors have stronger effect on the buyers who recently jonined in the community but weaker effect on the buyers with long duration in that the buyers with long duration are more clear about their needs and informational and selection effects are the major drivers of their ties formation.In the last study,we find that the information and singal based factors in social influence and selection effect are the major drivers before ties formation,i.e,the informational social influence,behavioral-homophily and status-homophily which are based on a lot of signal in the community while the social factors are taking the major roles on the stage of ties persistence,i.e.,the normative social influence is the major driver of ties persistence and the effect of informational social influence on ties persistence is weaker and excessive information post can even have negative effect(the pattern of inverted U shape).