| The online travel community featured with User Generated Content(UGC)serves as a platform for people with travel intention to communicate,making it easier for them to get timely and reliable travel information.With this information,tourists can make better travel decisions,deepen their travel experience and maintain connections with other travelers.The online travel community is based on the great amount of shared knowledge produced by users and the more the shared users are,the higher quality the shared knowledge is,the more conducive it will be for the survival and development of the website.High-quality knowledge sharing depends mainly on writers with rich travel experience and their active participation in knowledge sharing.However,the existing online travel communities are facing problems such as free rider,high conversion rate and low stickiness.Therefore,how to stimulate users' willingness to re-share knowledge and enhance their website stickiness becomes an urgent problem for these communities.The previous researches on incentive mechanism mainly focus on the collective impact of incentives on knowledge sharing.By dividing the incentives into material and spiritual incentives,most of the literatures have examined the separate influence of spiritual and material incentives on knowledge sharing.It is worth noting that these researches on the effects of material incentives on knowledge sharing is mainly conducted in an offline context,and they differentiate in their research conclusions.The positive effects of spiritual incentives on individual knowledge sharing have been unanimously proved by experts and scholars.However,some scholars have suggested that differences in the source of spiritual incentives should affect the individual's behavioral intention in a different way.The previous researches,nevertheless,fail to give a systematical analysis and interpretation on whether such differences have affect individual's knowledge sharing behavior,and whether there is any difference in their mechanisms.Therefore,based on the theory of Self-determination,Dual Process and Elaboration Likelihood Model,this study attempts to explore the role of the internal factors of incentive mechanism used by the online travel community to encourage the knowledge sharing behavior,that is,the strength,form and source of incentives,and how these different incentive factors or the combination of incentive factors affect the path and mechanism of incentives on knowledge re-sharing intention.This paper is divided into seven chapters.The first chapter introduces the research problems and explains the value of this research and its research methodology and design.The second chapter is a literature review in which the author systematically reviews the relevant researches on the online travel community,knowledge sharing,and incentive mechanism-the theoretical basis for this research.The third chapter explores the incentive mechanism of knowledge resharing in the online travel community.With the method of Content Analysis,the author sorts out the main components of the knowledge sharing incentive mechanism,and analyzes the relevant characteristics of the knowledge sharing incentives of the existing online travel communities,laying the foundation for the forming of research hypothesis and the construction of theoretical models.The fourth chapter studies the effects of material and spiritual incentives on knowledge re-sharing intention.Based on the Dual Process theory and Self-determination theory,the author explores the effects and mechanism of different levels of material incentives(no/low/high)and spiritual incentives(with/without)and their different combinations on knowledge re-sharing intention,providing reference for the rational design of the incentive systems for the online travel community.The fifth chapter investigates the influence of different forms of material incentives on the knowledge re-sharing intention and its mechanism.In addition to the effects of virtual currency incentives,this paper also compares the different impact of cash,vouchers and virtual currency incentives on the knowledge re-sharing intention and their mechanism differences.The sixth chapter analyzes the influence of spiritual incentives with different sources on the knowledge re-sharing intention and its different mechanisms.Following the analysis of the spiritual incentives indicated by the comprehensive evaluation from the website and the users,it further examines the differences in effect and mechanism of spiritual incentives with single source(website/user)and the spiritual incentives with mixed sources.The seventh chapter puts forward the main conclusions,implications for management,limitations of this research,and the future research directions.The main findings include:(1)The incentive mechanism for knowledge re-sharing on the existing online travel communities consists of three factors: the induction factors,the behavior rate system and the behavior-oriented system.The induction factors refer to the type of incentives;the behavior rate demonstrates the strength of incentives;and the behavior-oriented system stipulates clearly the expectations and directions.The online travel community stimulates users' knowledge re-sharing behavior through a combination of incentive types and strengths.(2)Material and spiritual incentives have different effects on knowledge resharing intention.(1)Without spiritual incentives,material incentives will boost knowledge re-sharing intention and this intention will be strengthened with the increase of incentive level.Material incentives impact the knowledge re-sharing intention by stimulating their perceived benefit and self-efficacy.(2)With spiritual incentives,material incentives at a low level are more effective on knowledge resharing intention than no material incentives and material incentives at a high level are less effective than material incentives at a low level.The material incentive and spiritual incentive can interact with each other and jointly affect the users' knowledge re-sharing intention through self-efficacy.(3)Different material incentives have different impact on knowledge re-sharing intention.(1)Different forms of material incentives such as virtual currency,cash and vouchers differ in terms of information processing load,denomination level and scope of application.(2)When there are spiritual incentives,material incentives of different forms will exert different impacts on knowledge re-sharing intention.When both spiritual incentives and material incentives(virtual currency)exist,material incentives at a low level are far more effective than no material incentives and material incentives at a high level on stimulating knowledge re-sharing intention.With the increase of material incentives,knowledge re-sharing intention will perform as an “inverted U” shape;when both spiritual incentives and cash incentives(vouchers)exist,material incentives at a low level are less effective than no material incentives and material incentives at a high level on stimulating knowledge resharing intention.With the increase of material incentives,knowledge re-sharing intention will present a “U” shape.(3)With spiritual incentives,virtual currency affects knowledge re-sharing intention through self-efficacy.Cash(vouchers)affects knowledge re-sharing intention through both self-efficacy and perceived benefit.(4)Spiritual incentives with different sources differ in their effects and mechanism on knowledge re-sharing intention.(1)Spiritual incentives offered by the website,by the users or by the mix of website and users differ in terms of their trustworthiness and professionalism.(2)Spiritual incentives with different sources have different motivation effects and the spiritual incentives given by both the website and users have the strongest effects.(3)Spiritual incentives with different sources have different effects on knowledge re-sharing intention.When there is spiritual incentive with mixed sources,low-level material incentives are far more effective than no material incentives and high-level material incentives on stimulating knowledge re-sharing intention.With the increase of material incentives,knowledge re-sharing intention will perform as an “inverted U”shape;when there are spiritual incentives with single source(website/user),material incentives at a low level are significantly less effective than no material incentives and material incentives at a high level on stimulating knowledge re-sharing intention.With the increase of material incentives,knowledge re-sharing intention will present a “U”shape.(4)When there are spiritual incentives with mixed sources,material incentives can affect knowledge re-sharing intention through self-efficacy.When there are spiritual incentives with single source(website/user),material incentives affect knowledge re-sharing intention through perceived benefit and self-efficacy.The main contributions of this research include the following aspects:(1)This study analyzes the internal composition and elements of the incentive mechanism on knowledge re-sharing intention through text analysis on the existing online travel community,and classifies its induction factors and related concepts.Since the online travel community is a platform participated by users with interest who are free to enter or exit,it is not possible for the communities to ask binding obligations from the users and can only guide them to take actions that meet their expectations.Therefore,the constituent elements of incentive mechanism for users' knowledge re-sharing in the online travel community are different from the traditional incentive mechanism,so are its related characteristics and the forms of elements combination.This paper,through its exploratory research,systematically describes the internal composition of the incentive mechanism of the existing online travel community,presenting a diversified combination of incentive elements,which is conducive for the study of incentive mechanism for knowledge sharing in the online travel community in the future.(2)By exploring the interactive impact of material incentives and spiritual incentives on knowledge re-sharing intention in the online travel community,this study enriches the research framework in this field.Although previous studies have analyzed the independent impact of material and spiritual incentives on knowledge sharing,there is no study on the interactive impact of material and spiritual incentives on knowledge re-sharing intention.This paper also studied the interaction effects of material and spiritual incentives,showing a clearer picture to the incentive practice of the online travel community to encourage users' knowledge re-sharing intention,and gives a more detail description on the research of incentive mechanism for knowledge sharing in the online travel community.(3)By examining the mediating role of self-efficacy-the variable for measuring intrinsic motivation and perceived benefit-variable for extrinsic motivation,this study develops the research on re-sharing mechanism in the online travel community.This study integrates the intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation in its research,presents the different ways of influence of incentive mechanism on knowledge re-sharing,and finds that the different combinations of material incentives at different levels(no/low/high)and spiritual incentives(with/without)will influence knowledge re-sharing intention of knowledge through different paths.(4)This study explores the “Crowding Out Effect” of material incentives in the online travel community and its boundary conditions,enriching the research of incentive mechanism on knowledge sharing.With emphasis on the “Crowding Out Effect” of material incentives and the special characteristic of material and spiritual incentives in the online travel community,this paper makes a deep analysis on the effects and mechanism of different combination of material incentives on users' knowledge re-sharing intention and the effects and mechanism of different combination of spiritual incentives with different sources on users' knowledge resharing intention.By analyzing the effects' differences between different combinations of incentive factors,this paper clarifies the boundary conditions for the appearance of “Crowding Out Effect” of material incentives in the online travel community,deepening the related research of incentive mechanism on knowledge sharing.In spite of its theoretical contributions and management implications,this paper still has limitations in its data collection and research content.In the future research,it is also necessary to improve the external validity of the research on incentive mechanism on users' knowledge re-sharing intention in the online travel community.It is worth trying to obtain actual operational data directly from the online travel community,expand the data source,and explore other mediator variables and regulatory variables that are likely to affect the incentive mechanism and users' intention to re-share knowledge to further develop the theoretical framework of incentive mechanism on knowledge sharing. |
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