Factors Affecting Virtual Gift Acceptance: Mediating Roles Of Hedonic And Utilitarian Values

There is little formalized knowledge of virtual gifting in the information technology (IT) literature. The objective of this paper is to explore the factors affecting the acceptance of virtual gifts and specifically the factors within a virtual gift that affect individuals’ intention to accept it and the mediating role of these factors. This research combines several acceptances, hedonic and utilitarian view related theories to explore the factors affecting acceptance of virtual gifts. Moreover, this study investigates the effects of usefulness, beautifulness, subjective norms of the receiver, and importance of the giver of a virtual gift as determinants of its utilitarian or/and hedonic value. The study finally examines the impact of the normative quality of the giver on the appropriateness of the virtual gift. A proposed research model will be tested using survey data and PLS (Partial least square). The implications of the research will be discussed

Social control in online communities of consumption: a framework for community management

Online communities of consumption (OCCs) represent highly diverse groups of consumers whose interests are not always aligned. Social control in OCCs aims to effectively manage problems arising from this heterogeneity. Extant literature on social control in OCCs is fragmented as some studies focus on the principles of social control, while others focus on the implementation. Moreover, the domain is undertheorized. This article integrates the disparate literature on social control in OCCs providing a first unified conceptualization of the topic. The authors conceptualize social control as a system, or configuration, of moderation practices. Moderation practices are executed during interactions operating under different governance structures (market, hierarchy, and clan) and serving different purposes (interaction initiation, maintenance, and termination). From this conceptualization, important areas of future research emerge and research questions are developed. The framework also serves as a community management tool for OCC managers, enabling the diagnosis of social control problems and the elaboration of strategies and tactics to address them

Blurring the boundaries: Prosumption, circularity and online sustainable consumption through Freecycle

© The Author(s) 2015. This article explores the digital exchange and moral ordering of sustainable and ethical consumption in online Freecycle groups. Through interactive exchanges in digital (online posts) and material (consumer items) modes, Freecycling blurs three common binaries in analyses of consumption: (1) consumption/production, (2) digital/material and (3) mainstream/alternative. Drawing on Ritzer's notion of 'implosions' as well as practice theory, I show that Freecycling practices reimagine and reproduce both products and consumers, practising prosumption through mixed digital and material practices in a performative economy, and how mainstream and alternative ways of consuming are entangled in pursuit of more sustainable, ethical consumption. This challenges us to think beyond these traditional binaries and to conceptualise a more blurred, less analytically clean and more circular approach to studying consumption

Social control in online communities of consumption: a framework for community management

Online communities of consumption (OCCs) represent highly diverse groups of consumers whose interests are not always aligned. Social control in OCCs aims to effectively manage problems arising from this heterogeneity. Extant literature on social control in OCCs is fragmented as some studies focus on the principles of social control, while others focus on the implementation. Moreover, the domain is undertheorized. This article integrates the disparate literature on social control in OCCs providing a first unified conceptualization of the topic. The authors conceptualize social control as a system, or configuration, of moderation practices. Moderation practices are executed during interactions operating under different governance structures (market, hierarchy, and clan) and serving different purposes (interaction initiation, maintenance, and termination). From this conceptualization, important areas of future research emerge and research questions are developed. The framework also serves as a community management tool for OCC managers, enabling the diagnosis of social control problems and the elaboration of strategies and tactics to address them

Exploring mischief and mayhem in social computing or: how we learned to stop worrying and love the trolls

In this paper, we explore the role of mischief as borderline socially acceptable behaviour within social computing applications. Mischievous activity pushes the boundaries of the implicit social contract present in all online social systems, and, we argue, is of vital importance understanding online social interactions. Using examples from games and other applications, we explore mischief as an act of appropriation, which reinterprets mechanics defined by developers in unexpected and sometimes upsetting ways. Although frequently interpreted as negative and anti-social behaviour, we argue that mischief serves a vital social role, and find surprising richness in the chaos

Gaming on and off the social graph: the social structure of Facebook games

Games built on Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a phenomenon since 3rd party developer tools were released by OSNs such as Facebook. However, apart from their explosive popularity, little is known about the nature of the social networks that are built during play. In this paper, we present the findings of a network analysis study carried out on two Facebook applications, in comparison with a similar but stand-alone game. We found that games built both on and off a social graph exhibit similar social properties. Specifically, the distribution of player-to-player interactions decays as a power law with a similar exponent for the majority of players. For games built on the social network platform however, we find that the networks are characterised by a sharp cut-off, compared with the classically scale-free nature of the social network for the game not built on an existing social graph