Comparing the Behavioral Models in Cyber-World Using Social Roles

Cyber-world is a typical form of social syndication. Although the future of cyber-world seems bright, not all efforts have succeeded. Therefore, knowing how to motivate users and keep them continually visiting is an important challenge for creating successful cyber-world Web sites. Since that human behaviour varies according to people’s different social roles, this study investigated four social roles (habitual, active, personal, and lurker) in the cyber-worlds. 729 users of i-Partment were used to test the research model. This study empirically confirms the existence of different behavioural models, and revealed the implications for theory and practice