Research On Value Co-creation Mechanism From The Perspective Of Social Interaction

Value creation is one of the most important topics in economic and management theory and practice.Recently,a paradigm transformation occurred in value creation from value chain to value network and a value ecosystem paradigm is upcoming.In the value creation paradigm transformation process,individuals represented by customers or users have participated in the value creation process through extensive social interaction with the help of digital technology and co-create amount of social value and economic value through customer-to-customer interaction.Thus,a new value creation ecosystem constructed by multiple actors including company,customer and stakeholder are developing.However,value co-creation based on service dominant logic have focused on the value co-creation between company and customers for the long term but pay little attention on the value co-creation between customer and customer through social interaction.It is not sufficient to explain the mechanism of value creation ecosystem among multiple actors.On basis of the theoretical gap,this paper try to contribute to the value co-creation theory by adopting theories,research model and methodology from management science,economics,sociology,psychology and computer science from the social interaction theory perspective.This research was carried by following the research logic of’value co-creation actor-value co-creation process-value co-creation outcomes’ and the multi research level from meso-social level,micro-social level to individuals level.Besides,both static and dynamic research perspectives were adopted.Based on the research result,a model of value co-creation mechanism from the social interaction perspective integrating Actor-to-Actor interaction and Individual-to-Individual interaction was proposed.The main conclusions of this dissertation are as follows.First,in the meso-social level,the development of platform ecosystem in which multiple actors engage goes through several stages.In different developing stage,different actors including company,customer and stakeholders co-create value through network interaction and resource integration.The relationship between different actors is characterized of dynamic evolution and the change of relationship derive the dynamic evolution of service dominant logic and support the continuous evolution of value co-creation model.Facilitated by platform company,customer interact with fellow customers and co-create functional and experience value for themselves and non-transactional value for the platform company.Second,in the micro-social level,the evolutionary path of value co-creation among platform,customers and other customers will be affected by factors including the by the total amount of resources,each subject’s resource investment intention,resource integration ability,reward and punishment regulation design.In addition,in the value co-creation process of three actors,the interactive strategies of the two players will affect the strategy selection of the third party.Therefore,the value co-creation in many to many interaction are of high complexity.Third,in the individual level,the C2C interaction value co-creation behaviors are influenced by environmental factors.A survey of 385 users in a social Q&A community shows that personalized recommendation,social interactivity and topic richness have a positive impact on self-competence,self-autonomy and self-relatedness,which subsequently affect user’s knowledge sharing and integration behavior.Moreover,self-determination have a mediating effect between platform characteristics and knowledge sharing and integration behavior.Through the in-depth study of above questions,several innovations in this research are as follows:First is research perspective innovation.This research take a perspective of social interaction to understand value co-creation mechanism.Research on value co-creation mainly focused on the dyad relationship between company and customer but pay little attention on social interaction between customer and customers facilitated by digital technology.This research take social interaction perspective to study value co-creation mechanism,especially focus on the impact of customer-to-customer interaction on value co-creation.By adopting the perspective of social interaction,it can better supplement the deficiencies of the existing value co-creation theory,and provide innovative insights to understand the value co-creation theory from the vertical and horizontal perspectives of "customer and firm" and "customer and customer".Second is research content innovation.This research expands the traditional dyad relationship between company and customer to a triad relationship among company,customer and stakeholder,and all the three actors play a dynamic role in value co-creation.This triad relationship adopted can provide an effective method to understand complex value co-creation behavior performed by multiple actors in network and platform ecosystem environment.In addition,this research take platform company as an value co-creation actor not only interactive environment because the platform company play different roles in different stages of platform ecosystem.Third is research variable innovation.This research considers non-transactional variavbles in value co-creation.Previous studies in value co-creation mainly focused on value co-creation in business situation or the transactional value created by customers.However,customer interaction with other customers in non-business situation and co-create non-transactional value including customer knowledge,customer referral value,C2B innovation value.Therefore,Tthis study divides the value of value co-creation into transactional value and non-transactional value,which expands the related research on the outcome of value co-creation.