Essays on Crowdfunding Adoption and Behavior

The aim of this dissertation is to examine aspects of crowdfunding adoption and behavior. Accordingly, the overarching research question answered by this dissertation is: what influences crowdfunding backers’ contribution intentions and behaviors? The dissertation answers this question while focusing on dimensions of trust, community, and technological acceptance. The dissertation is made up of three studies with one conceptual article (study 1), and two empirical studies (study 2 and 3). The conceptual study marries marketing and trust literatures and contextualizes their implications for the crowdfunding context. The result is the development of a framework of trust-based marketing strategies for crowdfunding campaigns, building on the understanding of the critical role played by trust in crowdfunding adoption by prospective backers. The empirical studies (i.e., study 2 and 3), are based on the analyses of empirical data collected from actual platform users, while using Structural Equation Model techniques. These studies examine the antecedents of backers’ contribution intentions and behavior, specifically in the context of reward crowdfunding in Finland. Study 2 explains backers’ intention and behavior by testing the extensive version of the technology acceptance model (TAM). It confirms the relevance of the TAM model for properly capturing influential antecedents of backers’ financial contribution intentions and behavior and further elaborates on the specific influences of backers’ experiences and voluntariness, which challenge existing conceptualizations from other information and communication technology -related contexts. Study 3 builds on the view of crowdfunding as an embedded phenomenon in online communities, to develop a community-based crowdfunding framework for explaining backers’ contribution intentions and behaviors, while highlighting the roles of community identification and community trust.publishedVersio

What Makes a Hot Deal? Drivers of Deal Popularity in Online Deal Communities

Online deal communities where members can submit deals offered by firms and where they share information on discounted products are currently enjoying great popularity. However, studies on drivers of deal popularity in these communities are still scarce. Although deal popularity may be attributed to a large extent to the discount price, an extensive investigation of why some deals are voted more favorably than others is still lacking. Addressing this question by analyzing intrinsic and extrinsic deal quality signals, we advance knowledge in three ways. First, we enhance the understanding of the antecedents of human voting behavior in online deal communities building on signaling and social influence theory. Second, we improve the value of deal platforms by providing guidance on which factors determine the deal’s value to the community. Third, we provide a model to predict a minimum level of achievable deal popularity in the absence of community members’ votes

Consumer Adoption of Health Information Systems

At nearly 18 percent of the country\u27s GDP, the U.S. healthcare industry continues to wrestle with growing cost and a quality of care that does not match the increased spending. The dominant focus to date has been on promoting Health IT (HIT) system implementation and digitizing health records at the provider\u27s end, with scant attention to the role of the patient in the healthcare process. The source of inefficiency in the healthcare system is not only on account of shortcomings at the provider\u27s end but also due to non-compliance (such as failing to adhere to medication advice and follow-up visits) at the patient\u27s end. Because of this two-fold inefficiency, recent focus has been on engaging the patient to jointly work with the physicians in managing their health and wellness. There are several health related IT applications (popularly called as health apps) and online health communities directly targeted at the consumer for aiding self-management of one\u27s health and wellness. However, widespread adoption and usage of these systems by consumers is yet to happen, which underscores the need for a systematic study to identify the factors that drive consumer adoption and usage of these HIT systems. This dissertation focuses on the mechanisms underlying consumer adoption and usage of HIT systems through three essays. Together the three essays advance our knowledge of the factors that underlie consumer adoption and usage of HIT systems and the interventions through which adoption and usage of these systems can be further enhanced. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed. Future research that builds on the findings of this dissertation research will not only advance theory but also significantly impact policies that guide IT driven consumer health and wellness initiatives

REWARDING PROSOCIALITY ON NON-COMMERCIAL ONLINE SHARING PLATFORMS

Digitization and new trends in consumption behaviour have brought forward new business models within the Sharing Economy (SE). While commercial online sharing platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have already received some attention by researchers, non-commercial online platforms have remained largely unexplored. At the same time, prosocial motives are playing an increasingly central role in participation in the SE, calling for a better understanding of prosocial factors influencing user behaviour. This paper aims to close this gap by assessing the effect of prosociality, via donation behaviour in previous and current transactions, on the likelihood to make a transaction on non-commercial online sharing platforms. We conduct a controlled online experiment and find a significant increase in trans-action likelihood in the presence of prosociality. Users who donated in previous transactions are twice as likely to make a transaction and three times more likely if they donate in current transactions. However, if simultaneously present they crowd each other out, suggesting a potential penalization of excessive prosociality. This paper contributes to the scarce Information Systems (IS) literature on non-commercial online sharing platforms by introducing prosociality as central design feature, and provides valuable insights into designing incentive schemes to foster traffic on online sharing platforms

Biases in Social Commerce Users\u27 Rational Risk Considerations

Social commerce has emerged as a new commercial platform which uses social media features in addition to conventional commerce facilities to enhance users’ shopping experience. It thus adds a social context to the conventional online commerce platforms. Nonetheless, the effect of these social facets on social commerce users’ behaviors is not fully studied. Furthermore, current social commerce literature mainly focused on factors that drive social commerce acceptance; however, there are negative factors which may demotivate or deter the social commerce use. In this study, we suggest potential risks that may hinder users’ engagement in the social commerce platforms. Moreover, drawing upon the “risky/choice shift” logic, habit literature, and information cascade theory, we propose that social identification, habitual use, and herding behavior can skew the way social commerce users consider and weight risks in their purchasing and participation decisions

The Contribution of IT Features to Increase Trust and Participation in Online Communities: An Empirical Analysis

Despite the fact that online communities (OCs) enjoy a growing number of members, their success is regularly impaired by infringements of user trust by either the community operator or other users. Since previous research studies have focused their investigation of the effects of single IT factors on user trust and participation in OCs, the field lacks an integrative view on how a comprehensive set of IT factors affect trust and participation from a user perspective. This study aimed to address this limitation in the IS literature by conducting an online-survey among 364 members of general-interest OCs. The results show that the four clusters of IT factors (usability, transparency, quality assured content, and security/privacy) investigated in this study vary in their impact on trust factors and participation. Interestingly, usability was the sole IT factor to significantly influence both trust and participation. While transparency had only a significant effect on trust variables, quality-assured content and security/privacy-related IT factors were significantly related only to participation. Our findings offer a variety of theoretical and practical contributions that shed light on the design of online communities and on strategies that can be used to attract new users by investing money in appropriate IT mechanisms

Conceptualizing the Electronic Word-of-Mouth Process: What We Know and Need to Know About eWOM Creation, Exposure, and Evaluation

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is a prevalent consumer practice that has undeniable effects on the company bottom line, yet it remains an over-labeled and under-theorized concept. Thus, marketers could benefit from a practical, science-based roadmap to maximize its business value. Building on the consumer motivation–opportunity–ability framework, this study conceptualizes three distinct stages in the eWOM process: eWOM creation, eWOM exposure, and eWOM evaluation. For each stage, we adopt a dual lens—from the perspective of the consumer (who sends and receives eWOM) and that of the marketer (who amplifies and manages eWOM for business results)—to synthesize key research insights and propose a research agenda based on a multidisciplinary systematic review of 1050 academic publications on eWOM published between 1996 and 2019. We conclude with a discussion of the future of eWOM research and practice

Indigenous Siberian Food Sharing Networks: Social Innovation in a Transforming Economy

The sustainability of indigenous communities in the Arctic, and the vulnerable households within, is in large part dependent on their continuing food security. A social food-sharing network within the Ust’-Avam community on the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia is analyzed for underlying patterns of resilience and key evolutionarily stable strategies supporting cooperative behavior. Factors influencing the network include interhousehold relatedness, reciprocal sharing, and interaction effects. Social association also influences sharing. Evidence for multiple determinants of food sharing in this sample is discussed in reference to major evolutionary hypotheses and comparable studies. In sum, the findings illustrate the robustness of self-organizing distribution networks in an economic context of uncertainty

Trusting those who trust you: A study on trust and privacy on Facebook

Over more than a decade, IS research has examined the role of trust in the context of technology adoption such as website acceptance(Gefen et al. 2003), successful online interactions(Coppola et al. 2004) and recommendation agents usage(Wang and Benbasat 2005). The primary antecedent of trust in the line of research is often trustee’s trustworthiness. However, Dashiti et al. (2011) articulated the role of trust- received(trustor’s felt trust from trustee) will cause trust-given(trustor’s trust in trustee) and later the trusting behaviors in the e-government context. Drawing on the recent development, this study aims to investigate the context of online social networks (OSNs) and to test whether trust-received plays a similar role in forming the interpersonal trust among Facebook user’s interactions. We aim to find out (i) whether users are more willing to trust others and share their personal information with them when individuals experienced trust-received and (ii) what IT features influence trust-received

Keep them alive! Design and Evaluation of the “Community Fostering Reference Model”

Firms host online communities for commercial purposes, for example in order to integrate customers into ideation for new product development. The success of these firm-hosted online communities depends entirely on the cooperation of a high number of customers that constantly produce valuable knowledge for firms. However, in practice, the majority of successfully implemented communities suffers from stagnation and even a decrease of member activities over time. Literature provides numerous guidelines on how to build and launch these online communities. While these models describe the initial steps of acquiring and activating a community base from scratch very well and explicitly, they neglect continuous member activation and acquistion after a successful launch. Against this background, the authors propose the Community Fostering Reference Model (CoFoRM), which represents a set of general procedures and instruments to continuously foster member activity. In this paper, the authors present the theory-driven design as well as the evaluation of the CoFoRM in a practical use setting. The evaluation results reveal that the CoFoRM represents a valuable instrument in the daily working routine of community managers, since it efficiently helps activating community members especially in the late phases of a community’s LifeCycle