Browsing by Subject "Virtual communities"
Item Essays on participation dynamics and informational value of virtual communities(2010-08) Park, Jaehong, 1973-; Gu, Bin, Ph. D.; Konana, Prabhudev C.; Raghunathan, Rajagopal; Kumar, Alok; Whinston, Andrew B.In recent years, virtual communities have become increasingly popular among online users and businesses. Public press has shown a strong interest in virtual communities and announced their informational value. The explosive growth of virtual communities has aroused tremendous interest among academic researchers as well. Academic researchers have noticed that participation dynamics of virtual communities among online users create valuable information that influences subsequent economic outcome. However, relatively little research has explored the underlying motives of passive and active participation in virtual communities. In particular, research explicating how the information created by user participation influences users’ economic decisions has not been investigated. To investigate user participation dynamics and the resulting informational value of virtual communities, I explore three major issues in my dissertation. First, I investigate the determinants of passive and active users of virtual communities using survey data from 502 online investors. The results indicate that social, psychological, and community factors influence two different behavioral intentions – the intention to share and the intention to seek. For instance, social factors such as reputation seeking increase the intention to share in virtual communities, whereas psychological factors such as perceived knowledge deteriorate the intention to seek. Second, I explore how an online investor processes information posted on virtual communities and its subsequent economic outcomes by conducting a field experiment. I find that psychological bias (e.g., confirmation bias) influences investors’ information processing behaviors, which ultimately leads to a low return of investment as compared to economic rationales. Following this line of exploration, I empirically examine the relative informational impact of virtual communities on users’ decisions and market performance in the context of electronic markets. Using customer review data from a well-known online retailer and from three third-party customer review websites, I find that consumers obtain product information from external information sources during the information search stage for high involvement products and are thus less influenced by retailer-hosted information. All in all, my dissertation contributes to the understanding of user participation dynamics and informational value of virtual communities by investigating users’ information processing behavior and the subsequent economic outcomes and performance.Item When more is less : understanding how to leverage expertise diversity manifested in an electronic advice network(2011-08) Kim, Yongsuk; Jarvenpaa, S. L. (Sirkka L.); McDaniel, Reuben; Beath, Cynthia; Tanriverdi, H�seyin; Lewis, KyleAn electronic advice network provides employees opportunities to tap diverse experts within the organization at an unprecedented speed and scale. It is formed when an advice seeker initiates an online discussion thread joined by members of various communities, each specializing in a specific domain. This dissertation recognizes the substantial gap in our understanding of how to best harness the performance potential of expertise diversity provided through an electronic advice network within a firm. It thus investigates the process by and conditions under which expertise diversity in an electronic advice network promotes the advice seeker’s learning and performance. A field study was conducted via multi-methods including observation, interviews, and survey at a global company running discussion forums spanning internal virtual communities. The unit of analysis was at the discussion thread level. 190 discussion threads comprising 1,200 participants and associated outcomes (rated by their respective advice seekers) were analyzed. Findings suggest that, for the seeker to realize the performance potential of diverse inputs, discussion participants should facilitate the seeker’s learning by engaging in collective elaboration—articulating the differences and relevance of their diverse inputs. The seeker learned and performed the least when discussion participants were highly diverse but did not engage in collective elaboration. Discussion participants engaged in collective elaboration to the extent that they had previously established shared syntactic and semantic understanding of each other’s expertise domains through participation in each other’s communities. This dissertation contributes to the virtual communities literature by unearthing the relationships between expertise diversity and the advice seeker’s learning and performance and explaining when and how the seeker benefits from the diverse knowledge shared through an electronic advice network. The moderating role of collective elaboration explains why prior research may have found no or even a negative relationship between expertise diversity and discussion outcomes. It also contributes to the team literature by offering boundary conditions for the previous findings on expertise diversity and common ground. The collective elaboration construct can be also adopted by team diversity researchers to better understand where a disruption in the chain of group-level information processing may occur in some diverse teams.