| With the development of the Internet, Virtual Communities, as a special networkcommunication platform, they promote in-depth communications andinteractionsbetweennetizens, and are becomingmore and more popular on the Internet. Theinformation exchange methodof Q&A type communities broke the information exchangemethod of the traditional Virtual Communities, which was single direction.Social Q&Avirtual communitiesare thosewhose users ask well-directed questions, thenthe questions areautomatically classified to a professional section, thus many other users with sameprofessional background can have an “ask and answer” interaction.And thenquestionerspickout the best answer within a certain time, or those users can have a vote to get a best answertogether. At the same time,by sharing knowledge, the usersof communitiescan establish asocial relation with the communities and other individual users, and get a sense of identity andbelonging, which will promote further knowledge sharing behaviorThe core value of a successful Q&A community is to keep supplying knowledgebeneficially and fully to promote users to interact constantly, which means to improve thedegree of users’ activities and to help them to get the best answers at the same time.However,by looking at the situation ofcurrent Q&A communities, I found the major problemis that questions and answers vary considerably in quality. How to improve the degree ofusers’ activity, but also to ensure both quality and quantity of the answers, is becoming thefocus of community management team and related researching scholars.In view of the above issues, this article will construct theoretical modeland systemdynamics model of incentive mechanism by referring to the existed studies and combining theknowledge sharing features of social Q&A communities. Through comprehensive empiricalresearch, network data mining and expert interviews, etc. to get the model parameters, thenverify the authenticity and validity of the model.Collecting the analysis and simulation resultsof actual community features, and controlling and adjusting the parameters of the keyfactors,is to explore the influence of key factors on the quantity of shared knowledge bydifferent types of users, and on the quantity/quality of the whole community. Then providesuggestions to improve the incentive mechanism and the current situation of the community.The study found:(1) With the development of the community, there is a relationship ofconnection and restriction between different types of users in communities.(2) The amount ofshared knowledge by the viewers andby the answerers is both in exponential growth, which isthe backbone of knowledge sharing in communities.(3) The amount of shared knowledge by expert and by social Q&A communities is both in exponential growth.(4) The quality ofshared knowledge in social Q&A communities showed a trend of negative growth, and finallystays a stabilized level.(5) Perceived usefulness has a great impact on the quantity of sharedknowledge by viewers; Social contact needs and perceived usefulness has a great impact onthe quantity of shared knowledge by questioner; Self-centrality has a great impact on thequantity of shared knowledge by answers; Community development has a great impact on thequantity of shared knowledge by experts, self-efficacy increase has little effect on theirsharing while reducing self-efficacy will; Centrality and Social contact needs has an obviouseffect on the quantity of shared knowledge in social Q&A communities, but less effect on thequality.The innovation of this study is: use system dynamics method to researchincentivemechanism of knowledge sharing in Q&A communities. Focus on the simulation study of“Baidu Zhidao”, explore effective ways to help users to improve the quantity and quality ofknowledge sharing behavior. Not only enrich the sharing theory of Virtual Communitiestheoretically, but provide guiding and suggestion to the development strategy formulation ofsocial Q&A communities from practice. |
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