Research On The Impact Of Providing Paid Knowledge Service On Users' Free Knowledge Contribution:Evidence From An Online Q&A Community

With the rapid development of Web2,0 technology and the promotion of the public's needs and interests,the scale of the knowledge service industry continues to expand,and many online Q&A communities for knowledge exchange and collaboration have emerged.On the one hand,the free knowledge contribution has accumulated a large number of users for the online Q&A community,which is the foundation of maintaining the sustainable development of the community;on the other hand,under the combined effects of cognitive surplus and consumption upgrade,the fee-based knowledge has become a new information interaction model,because it has met the needs of both the supplier and the demander.Therefore,the influencing factors of user's free knowledge contribution and paying for knowledge related research have received extensive attention from academic circles.However,few studies have combined both free knowledge contributions and paying for knowledge within a single research.In fact,free and paid knowledge services coexist in the online Q&A community,but the relationship between the two types of knowledge contribution is not clear.That is,we have no idea,after providing paid knowledge,whether users prefer continuing to provide free knowledge contribution for attracting users,or prefer reducing free knowledge contribution for the purpose of converting the limited knowledge into economic value.In summary,there are disagreements on the impact of providing paid knowledge services on users' free knowledge contributions.In order to resolve the above-mentioned disagreements,this article follows the principles of scientificity,feasibility,and rationality,utilizing literature analysis,theoretical deduction,and empirical analysis to conduct our research.The free knowledge contribution of users in the online Q&A community is classified into two categories,namely,solicited and voluntary knowledge contribution.Further,we also introduces the user level as a moderating variable,and explores the impact of providing paid knowledge services on users' free knowledge contributions and the differences between different users.First,this research conducted a comprehensive literature review on topics about online Q&A communities,the influencing factors of knowledge contribution,and the related work on paying for knowledge.On this basis,the research hypothesis of this article is proposed based on expected value theory and signal theory.Secondly,this paper crawled a large number of cross-sectional data and panel data of user activities in online Q&A communities,and applied negative binomial model and a fixed effect model to analyze the two data sets respectively.Finally,this research reached the following main conclusions:(1)In the online Q&A community,whether users participating in the provision of paid knowledge services is positively related to the amount of solicited and voluntary free knowledge contribution.(2)The number of providing paid knowledge services of users has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the amount of solicited and voluntary free knowledge contributions.(3)User level can moderate the relationship between the number of providing paid knowledge services by users and the amount of solicited and voluntary free content contributions.Specifically,users with lower level are more likely to be affected by the providing paid knowledge services and increase the amount of solicited and voluntary free knowledge contributions.The current work has several innovation points.First,it explores the internal connection between users' free and paid knowledge contributions,breaking the status quo that previous research only paid attention to one aspect of it.Secondly,considering the role of user characteristics as a moderating variable,this research fully takes into account the differences in characteristics between users,such as motivation and needs In addition,panel data analysis is added to alleviate the endogenous problem of second-hand data.In general,the research conclusions and innovations of this article have important theoretical and practical significance for the online Q&A communities related research and management practice.