How Do Perceptions of Virtual Worlds Lead to Enhanced Learning? An Empirical Investigation

Virtual worlds are receiving increasing attention as a promising technology to engage students in learning. However, the use of these technologies for educational purposes is currently hampered by a lack of understanding of how better learning can be achieved in such environments. Thus motivated, this study uses the lenses of flow and social translucence of technology theories to model the individual and technology-related perceptions that influence learning outcomes. Our results show that better learning is associated with learners’ flow experience variables (concentration and enjoyment) as well as a sense of presence (social and telepresence) in the virtual world. Further, the flow experience variables are influenced by the social and telepresence felt by participants, directly or indirectly via social norms. Unique to the virtual world environment, the three-dimensional realism experienced by learners is important in shaping their presence perceptions. The findings provide implications for both research and practice in this area

Beauty Sells: Identifying Physical Attractiveness Effect In an Online Dating Platform

While online dating platforms offer new IT-enabled capabilities which do not exist in the physical world before, little is known about whether any fundamental matching rules are reshaped in the online environment. In this paper, we address the gap by studying one such factor, i.e. mate physical attractiveness, in an online dating platform. By using a unique dataset and machine-learning based algorithmic approach, the study successfully overcomes various confounding issues, selection bias and physical attractiveness measurement issues and estimates the physical attractiveness effect in online users’ dating decision. Results reveal the essence of physical attractiveness in online context and the disappearing geographic boundary. The findings and methods are essential to both our understanding of the mechanisms that drive match mating online and our knowledge of how to propagate them in various fields where large scales of objective physical attractiveness and behavioral data are emerging

The Influence Of User Interaction And Participation In Social Media On The Consumption Intention Of Niche Products

The potential of social media in helping businesses generate commercial values has attracted significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike in recent years. An important characteristic differentiating social media from traditional media is the central role of user interaction and participation in generating content that makes the platform sustainable and potentially profitable. It has been noted that social media may be particularly apt in promoting the sales of niche products, due to the tendency of consumers to generate reviews and discuss about such products that raise awareness about them. In this study, we build on and extend the extant literature to investigate how patterns of social interaction among the consumers in discussing about a niche product influence the overall level of participation, which in turn enhances consumption intention of the product. Through analyzing data from a social media site that allows consumers to comment on and discuss about books of philosophical genre (a niche product type), we show that the level of user participation can indeed have a significant positive effect on consumption intention. Furthermore, inclusiveness and betweenness centralization structures may enhance the participation level, but out-degree centralization has a detrimental effect. Implications for research and practice are discussed

The role of social capital in expanding retail platform ecosystems

In the past few years, the discussion on platform ecosystems has become pervasive in strategy and information system research. Previous studies underlie the transformational nature of digital infrastructure in expanding the ecosystem. In this paper, the authors focus on the retail sector, where online retail platform owners such as Amazon and Alibaba are contending for ecosystem members and expanding by making them more physical. As ecosystem members have traditionally coordinated their network activities and resources embedded in an enabling social context, this study aims to investigate the influence of preexisting social capital possessed by ecosystem members on expansion of retail platform ecosystems. This dimension has received little attention thus far. Based on some conceptual basis discussed by extant literature and some preliminary empirical findings through our case study on Alibaba Lingshoutong (LST), a growing retail platform ecosystem, we have proposed some future research directions. © Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems: Information Systems (IS) for the Future, PACIS 2020. All rights reserved

Scientific Knowledge Communication in Online Q&A Communities: Linguistic Devices as a Tool to Increase the Popularity and Perceived Professionalism of Knowledge Contribution

With the popularity of question-and-answer (Q&A) communities, widespread dissemination of scientific knowledge has become more viable than ever before. However, those contributing high-quality professional scientific knowledge are confronted with the challenge of making their contributions popular, since non expert readers may not recognize the importance of their contributions given the massive amount of information available online. In this study, we show that non expert readers are capable of evaluating the professionalism of content contributed in such communities as well as experts. However, we discovered that a salient discrepancy exists between the content non experts favor and the content they perceive as professional. In line with studies that have suggested that writing techniques play an important role in how expert content is received by lay persons, we investigated how the use of linguistic devices affects both the perceived professionalism and the popularity of contributions in Q&A communities. Based on both secondary data and a scenario-based survey, we identified specific linguistic devices that can increase content popularity without reducing perceived professionalism. Additionally, we revealed linguistic devices that increase popularity at the expense of perceived professionalism in this context. Finally, we conducted a laboratory experiment to more firmly establish the causal effects of the linguistic device use. The triangulated findings have important implications for both research and practice on communicating scientific knowledge in Q&A communitie

Who Are More Active and Influential on Twitter?:An Investigation of the Ukraine’s Conflict Episode

Twitter is an emerging form of news media with a wide spectrum of participants involving in news dissemination. Owing to their open and interactive nature, individuals, non-media, and non-commercial participants may play a greater role on this platform; thus, it is deemed to disrupt conventional media structures and introduce new ways of information flow. While this may be true in certain aspects in news dissemination such as allowing a broader range of participants, the authors' analysis of the involvement and influence of the different participant types, based on a large tweets dataset collected during the Ukraine's conflict event (2013-2014), portrays a different picture. Specifically, the results unveil that while non-commercial participants were the most “involved” in generating tweets about the news event, the retweets they attracted, a common measure of influence, were among the lowest. In contrast, mass media and sources related to journalists, professional associations and commercial organizations garnered the highest retweets

WEATHER EFFECTS ON CONSUMER VARIETY-SEEKING

With the increasing prevalence of online businesses and social networking services, a huge volume of data about transaction records and social connections between users is accumulated at an unprecedented speed, which enables us to take advantage of electronic word-of-mouth effect embedded in social networks for precision marketing and social recommendations. Different from existing works on social recommendations, our research focuses on discriminating the community-level social influence of different friend groups to enhance the quality of recommendation. To this end, we propose a novel probabilistic topic model integrating community detection with topic discovery to model user behaviors. Based on this model, a recommendation method taking both individual interests and conformity influence into consideration is developed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model and method, experiments are conducted on two real recommendation applications, and the results demonstrate that the proposed recommendation method exhibits superior performance compared with the state-of-art recommendation methods, and the proposed topic model exhibits good explainablibity of topic semantics and community interests. Furthermore, as some people are more individual interest oriented and some are more conformity oriented demonstrated by the experiments, we explore factors that influence each individual’s conformity tendency, and obtain some meaningful findings

Towards a Process Model of Media Usage in Global Virtual Teams

In the networked world of today, global virtual teams (GVT) are becoming a common form of work structure. The geographic dispersion in GVT has led to members\u27 high reliance on electronic communication media for collaboration and task performance. With advancements in ICT, the range of media to choose from has increased considerably. This complicates the process of selection and usage of media to serve different communication needs in GVT. Therefore we are motivated to investigate how GVT members perform the process of media selection and usage. This is achieved through an in-depth case study of three GVT. We conducted template coding of the teams\u27 communications logs and lessons learnt papers, followed by cognitive mapping to derive the GVT media usage process model. The model can provide a basis for further empirical validation and deriving practical implications for GVT management

Do the Means and the Source Matter? A Study on the Actual Usage of Digitally Disseminated Coupons

How to effectively distribute coupons digitally to consumers who may exercise them remains an enduring, yet important, issue to address. In this study, we seek to answer two questions. First, would the dissemination of product discount coupons through mobile technology, such as the mobile phone network via the short-message-service (SMS), yield different effects on consumers, compared to a more traditional communication technology such as e-mail? Second, does the source, that is, the merchant or referral from peers, matter to a consumer? We build on the theoretical lens of cognitive effort (technology) and social capital (source) to theorize and empirically validate the conjectures through a real-world field experiment spanning four weeks. In terms of technology, the results indicate no significant difference in terms of the usage rate of coupons between the two technological means through which the coupons were disseminated. However, in terms of the source, we observed a higher propensity of using coupons received from a peer as compared to coupons received from a merchant. Furthermore, the forwarding rate of the discount coupons was significantly higher via e-mail as compared to SMS. Implications for research and practice are discussed

FRIENDING AND GOAL ATTAINMENT: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN VIRTUAL WORLD

Encouraging individual goal pursuit through social influence is a growing trend. While friendships can be both an asset but also a burden, the impact friends have on goal attainment is not well established in the literature. We explore the influence that friend quantity and quality have on individual task-oriented goal-directed behavior using a unique set of online gaming data with a sample of about 33,000 individuals. Our results indicate a nonlinear relationship that suggests the number as well as the intimacy level of friendships positively impact individual goal achievement, but too much social friending becomes detrimental to individual goal pursuit. Females benefit slightly more from friendship amount and intimacy level, but also suffer more from too many exchanges with friends. Similarly, novice individuals not only benefit more from social influence than more experienced individuals in terms of goal pursuit, but also hurt more from friending behaviors. Our follow-up surveys with actual gamers provide additional evidence that friends indeed proffer information and emotional support that can promote goal attainment. However, too much friending can hurt goal completion due to information overload and time demands. These findings have important implications for consumers and managers regarding how social others influence individual goal attainment