| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 傳播研究所 === 107 === In 2016, the so-called first-year of knowledge payment, many online knowledge service platforms started to provide various types of paid content for different groups of people. Among them, "Zhihu", a Chinese online Q & A community, provides the widest range and types of content, and invites experts from all over the world to join its platform. By June 2018, it has recruited over 5,000 paid content producers and provided 15,000 knowledge service products for 6 million paid users.
Previous studies on knowledge sharing mostly focus on factors of knowledge sharing and emphasize self-efficacy, long-term relationship and return. This study takes Zhihu pay-for-knowledge as an example and uses the concept of social capital from Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) which contains structural, relational and cognitive orientation to explore the factors of pay-for-knowledge consumption behavior.
This study conducted an online survey and collected a total of 1,791 valid questionnaires, all were users of Zhihu, and among them, 530 people have used Zhihu pay-for-knowledge products. Results show that the ten factors in the structural model, including network connection, network configuration and appropriable organization in structural orientation, trust, identity, norm and reciprocity in relation orientation, sharing language, sharing narratives and sharing vision in cognitive orientation, all positively predict consumption behavior of Zhihu pay-for-knowledge. Among them, network configuration, reciprocity and sharing narratives are the most influential factors. The findings suggest that the social capital perspective adopted in the proposed model can explain and predict users’ consumption of Zhihu pay-for-knowledge. Additionally, gender, age, income and education also moderate the relationships between different factors and the two dimensions of consumption behavior, behavioral intention and use behavior.
This study provides an empirical support for interpreting the new phenomenon of pay-for-knowledge consumption from the perspective of social capital theory. This study hence proves itself as an extension of knowledge sharing research in practice and theory. It also provides managerial implications for pay-for-knowledge platforms. Management personnel need to adopt segmentation platform designs for different consumers according to their demographic backgrounds to increase their usage.
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