An Empirical Study at Members’ Information Giving Intentions in Virtual Communities

• Main Authors: Tzu-Ling Lin, 林姿伶
• Other Authors: Chechen Liao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/05852931546085449191

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 資訊管理學系 === 93 === Virtual communities have created a range of new social spaces in which to meet and interact with one another. Both as a stand-alone model or as a supplement to sustain competitive advantage for normal business models, building virtual communities has been hailed as one of the major strategic innovations of the new economy. However for a virtual community to evolve and prosper, the biggest challenge is how to make members actively give information or provide advices, etc. Even in busy virtual communities, usually only a small fraction of members post information actively. In order to investigate the determinants of information giving willingness of those contributors who usually actively provide their opinions, we apply the result model of Bagozzi and Dholakia (2002) as the basis of our theoretical model and add three important constructs to explain the reason for contribution in communities. An empirical study was undertaken and the data of 273 responses from information contributors in communities was collected. The model and hypotheses were tested in structural equation modeling technique. Research findings are described as follows: 1.Members’ perceived self-efficacy, perceived soft rewards, trust to other members, social identity, and positive anticipated emotions have positively effect on intention to give information through the mediation of desire to give information. 2.Perceived self-efficacy not only affects intention to give information with through desire but also affects the intention to give directly. 3.Female members trust in other members’ benevolence/integrity more than male members. However, male members perceived a higher degree of soft rewards than female members when providing information in communities. 4.Lurkers who have no post experiences in their communities are found having lower degree in all variables in the model except for perceived hard rewards.