The Value of Competing in Virtual Communities: Use and Exchange Value Creation in Online Auctioning

In this paper, we set out to examine how individual and organizational benefits are created in virtual communities characterized by competitive relationships. Drawing insights from value theory, we argue that individual benefits arise from the use value/satisfaction that users gain from their participation in such communities, whereas organizational benefits are derived from the aggregate monetary value that is created through competition among users, also understood as exchange value. Moreover, we hypothesize that the ways in which users compete and the level of rivalry among users influence the aforementioned types of value creation. We test our hypotheses in the context of a self-developed mobile application that serves as an auctioning platform for hotel rooms. A preliminary analysis grants initial support to our hypotheses. Our research contributes to the relevant literature by highlighting the diverse benefits that competitive relationships can bring and paves the way for further research on alternative community models

Proc ACM Hum Comput Interact

Participation in communities is essential to individual mental and physical health and can yield further benefits for members. With a growing amount of time spent participating in virtual communities, it's increasingly important that we understand how the community experience manifests in and varies across these online spaces. In this paper, we investigate Sense of Virtual Community (SOVC) in the context of live-streaming communities. Through a survey of 1,944 Twitch viewers, we identify that community experiences on Twitch vary along two primary dimensions: |, a feeling of membership and support within the group, and |, a feeling that the group is a well-run collective with standards for behavior. Leveraging the Social-Ecological Model, we map behavioral trace data from usage logs to various levels of the social ecology surrounding an individual user's participation within a community, in order to identify which of these can be associated with lower or higher SOVC. We find that features describing activity at the individual and community levels, but not features describing the community member's dyadic relationships, aid in predicting the SOVC that community members feel within channels. We consider implications for the design of live-streaming communities and for fostering the well-being of their members, and we consider theoretical implications for the study of SOVC in modern, interactive online contexts, particularly those fostering large-scale or pseudonymized interactions. We also explore how the Social-Ecological Model can be leveraged in other contexts relevant to Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), with implications for future work.CC999999/ImCDC/Intramural CDC HHSUnited States

HARNESSING ONLINE COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL MEDIA: ORDINARY USERS AND INFLUENTIAL USERS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Eliciting a sense of virtual community among knowledge contributors

10.1145/2019618.2019620ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems2

Understanding influences on the critical-to-success factors in online brand communities

In an internationally competitive market a company’s brand is its most valuable asset, and increasing and retaining loyal customers is key to long-term success. Forging binding relationships between consumers and their brand is therefore of critical importance to most organisations (Lhotáková, 2012). Previous studies indicate that online brand communities (OBCs) effectively facilitate such relationships (Backhaus, Steiner & Lugger, 2011; Madupu & Cooley, 2010) and provide companies with reliable marketing intelligence to potentially gain a competitive advantage. OBCs are online forums dedicated to a specific brand, where consumers gather and exchange information and socialise. Today they are more prevalent than ever before, yet research in this area is still limited. From a marketing perspective, research indicates that creating bonds between the consumer and the brand offers stability to the brand, and consumers who involve themselves with brand communities’ exhibit higher levels of brand loyalty (Brodie et al, 2013; Thomas & Veloutsou, 2013). Therefore it is essential that marketers understand the culture of OBC’s, in order to retain existing members, and to develop strategies to encourage new members to join. The objective of this study was to identify and examine both individual and community level attributes that influence members’ participative behaviour and sense of belonging (SOB) to OBCs, as these factors are critical for retaining members and sustaining the community. In addition, the strength of each relationship was measured, based on whether members were socialisers or information seekers, as this has been the subject of significant discourse in the online community literature. The investigation employed a mixed methods approach and two-stage process. The first stage involved netnography and focus groups (qualitative research) in order to provide depth and clarity to the study and structure to the questionnaire (quantitative research) used in stage two. The sample for this study consisted of 659 OBC members from around the world; however the majority of respondents (455) were from one specific community with an affiliation to the LEGO® brand. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to determine if items loaded on their respective constructs, Cronbach’s alpha was performed to check the internal consistency of the items for reliability, and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to determine the convergent and discriminant validity of the model. Finally, structural equation modelling (SEM), in the form of path analysis, was used to test the hypotheses. Key findings from the research indicate that the strongest individual level influence on participative behaviour in an OBC is the network ties that develop between members in the community. This suggests that friendships between community members have the capacity to increase the time they spend in the community and the number of posts they contribute. The level of perceived anonymity is another individual level factor found to have a significantly negative effect on participative behaviour, and a sense of belonging, therefore as members become more recognisable in the community the more they actively participate, and the greater attachment they develop to the community. From a community perspective social capital represented by a shared language, shared vision, social trust and reciprocity has the most significant influence on the sense of belonging members develop in the community. This suggests that the quality and structure of the relationships in an OBC, and the culture of the environment has a strong effect on the strength of the connection members cultivate with an OBC. Interestingly when the data is separated between subgroups of information seekers and socialisers network ties only increase participative behaviour for information seekers, and perceived anonymity only has an influence on participative behaviour for socialisers. The results of this study support the proposed conceptual model and offer insights into the different influences on consumer behaviour in OBCs, and how the purpose for participation affects the composition and strength of those influences. Iimplications for marketers, organisations and OBC administrators include a greater understanding of the factors that encourage and support participative behaviour and sense of belonging to the community. Consequently, stakeholders can use this information to develop strategies that will ensure the ongoing success of their OBCs. Theoretical contributions include bridging the gap between the literature related to online communities in general and the unique characteristics of OBC’s, developing a valid measurement scale for social capital in an OBC context, and establishing a structural framework of consumer behaviour specific to OBC’s

Virtual Entrepreneurship: Explicating the Antecedents of Firm Performance

Prior research has examined entrepreneurial businesses spatially located in the physical or offline context; however, recent radical information and technological breakthroughs allow entrepreneurs to launch their businesses completely online. The growth of the online business industry has been phenomenal. Predictions for worldwide online sales estimate it to reach $2 trillion in 2016. Virtual entrepreneurship refers to the pursuit and exploitation of opportunities via virtual platforms. Web 2.0 cybermediaries offer web-based platforms that function similarly to traditional intermediaries in a virtual setting and minimize barriers to entry for virtual entrepreneurial firms. The use of such cybermediaries with increasing success suggests an implicit shift in the dominant logic that typically underpins the functioning of entrepreneurial firms operating in the physical world. In this relatively uncharted territory, marked by a focus on profit, cooperation, collaboration and community, three ideal-type institutional logics i.e. Market, Corporation and Community, blend together. It is posited that a Virtual Entrepreneurial Logic guides the norms, behaviors, and practices of entrepreneurial firms operating via these virtual platforms. This raises the question whether the blending of three ideal-type logics leads to the existence of different antecedents of performance. A business model antecedent addressing the economic dimension, a community antecedent addressing the community dimension and a co-creation antecedent addressing the collaborative dimension of the Virtual Entrepreneurial Logic were therefore empirically examined in this study. Thus, three research questions were investigated to explicate the antecedents. Primary data from 1396 virtual entrepreneurial firms was collected (business model antecedent n=366, community antecedent n=732 and co-creation antecedent n= 298) to test the proposed hypotheses. Results provided support for the three antecedents. This study makes important theoretical and practical contributions to understanding the domain of virtual entrepreneurship from a blended logics perspective. Using the theoretical lens provided by institutional logics helps shed light on the pivotal role played by cybermediary platforms in the Web 2.0 context. The primary role of synergistic effects, cooperative behavior, and collaboration have important implications for virtual entrepreneurship. Findings also contribute to other related streams in entrepreneurship such as microenterprises. The study offers theoretical extensions of prior work on co-creation to virtual small entrepreneurial ventures. From a practical standpoint, insights can help entrepreneurs to better understand and leverage performance drivers in virtual contexts in general and on cybermediary platforms in particular

Semantic Annotation of Digital Objects by Multiagent Computing: Applications in Digital Heritage

Heritage organisations around the world are participating in broad scale digitisation projects, where traditional forms of heritage materials are being transcribed into digital representations in order to assist with their long-term preservation, facilitate cataloguing, and increase their accessibility to researchers and the general public. These digital formats open up a new world of opportunities for applying computational information retrieval techniques to heritage collections, making it easier than ever before to explore and document these materials. One of the key benefits of being able to easily share digital heritage collections is the strengthening and support of community memory, where members of a community contribute their perceptions and recollections of historical and cultural events so that this knowledge is not forgotten and lost over time. With the ever-growing popularity of digitally-native media and the high level of computer literacy in modern society, this is set to become a critical area for preservation in the immediate future