Research On User-generated Content Mechanism Of Social E-commerce Platforms ——From The Perspective Of Cultural Dimensions

With the wide application of big data,mobile Internet,artificial intelligence and other digital technologies,e-commerce is accelerating to become an important way of consumption in the era of digital economy.User-generated content or UGC is any form of content that is created and shared by the users based on their experiences,opinions,ideas,or feedback.In recent years,with the rapid development of typical user generated content application scenarios such as social e-commerce,the social transmission mechanism of user generated content reacting on users’ online consumption behavior has aroused widespread concern in academia.Rooted in users and deeply influenced by the social and cultural background,user generated content further improves the social and cultural attributes of online consumption behavior.The impact of cultural dimensions on users’ online consumption behavior is increasingly obvious.However,the specific mechanism of cultural dimensions on online consumption behavior is still insufficient.Based on online consumption in the digital era,this study investigated the relationship between user generated content and consumption behavior,and explored the mechanism of social e-commerce platforms from perspective of cultural dimensions.In order to investigate the mechanism of user generated content,three studies are conducted:（1）Perception mechanism model is constructed to analyze the differences of consumers’ online consumption behavior in different cultural backgrounds.The usefulness of online reviews is regarded as dependent variable,the feature of the content and the feature of the reviewers are regarded as independent variables,and the cultural dimensions are added as the adjustment variable,which highlights the regulatory effect of uncertainty avoidance.The results show that the objectivity and extremeness of online reviews have positive effects on consumers’ conception towards the usefulness of the reviews,and positively affect consumer decision-making;the cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance has a negative regulatory effect on the relationship between objectivity and usefulness of reviews;also,extreme evaluation is more useful than intermediate evaluation.（2）This study explores consumers’ tolerance on false reviews from the characteristics of false reviews,the delivery of false reviews,the features of the fake reviewers,and the high/low context of the reviews,and further reveals the influence of false reviews on consumers’ perception and consume behaviors.The results show that consumers pay more attention to emotional extremes,text similarity,publishing concentration,personal information disclosure and familiarity of reviewers in identifying false reviews.In the environment of social e-commerce,as for the consumers,the more familiar with reviewers,the more likely they are to believe the authenticity of reviews;the high/low context of reviews also affects consumers’ judgment.（3）This study analyzes the impact of cultural differences between China and the United States on consumers’ decision-making from social interaction,value perception and time pressure,and based on the S-R theory（stimulate response theory）,it explores the impact of price preference,time pressure and social group buying mechanism on consumers’ purchase behavior.The results show that consumers’ perception of commodity value and time pressure in group buying platforms will have a positive impact on purchase intention.Consumers with strong individualistic cultural tendency will not have higher purchase intention in social interaction,and they will pay more attention to the personal interests of price preference when they perceive value.In addition,uncertainty avoidance has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between social interaction and purchase intention.Providing more information in social interaction can help consumers with higher uncertainty avoidance to reduce uncertainty and stimulate consumption.The findings and main innovations are as follows:（1）This study introduces the theory of cultural dimensions into the analysis of consumers’ behavior of social e-commerce,explores the effect of cultural dimensions on online reviews,and deepens the understanding of the mechanism of consumer purchase intention in the context of social e-commerce;（2）This study investigates the influence of cultural differences on consumer behaviors between China and the West,and analyzes consumers’ identification of false reviews.（3）Based on text mining,this study explores the impact of the objectivity of reviews on consumers’ decision-making,and focuses on different effects of social group buying mechanism and price factors,with individualism/collectivism and uncertainty avoidance as moderating variables,and further reveals the influence of cultural differences on the purchase behavior of social e-commerce users.This paper is divided into six chapters.In the introduction,the research background,research significance,research content,research methods and technical routes are introduced.Chapter Two is literature review,which focuses on the research status of social e-commerce,user generated content,and user generated content mechanism and cultural dimension at home and abroad.The assumptions and theoretical models are proposed on the basis of the review and theoretical analysis,and the evaluation mechanism,identification mechanism and decision-making mechanism of user-generated content are discussed respectively from Chapter Three to Chapter Five.The Conclusion includes the summary of main research findings,contributions and the future research prospects.