A Study On Users’ Product Recommendation Behavior In Virtual Communities

The development of Web3.0 technology and mobile network communication technology have profoundly changed the ways people live,study,work and share information.Virtual community based on mobile Internet has gradually become one of the most important channels for people to exchange ideas,seek support,share resources because of its boundlessness and convenience.The shopping experience and product information shared by other users in the virtual community not only play roles of information filtering,but also play roles of emotional communication and social interaction,and,therefore,are playing an increasingly essential role in people’s information-searching process and purchase decisionmaking process.The existing researching papers on WOM and eWOM have been sufficient,but researches on product recommendation in virtual communities have not been paid much attention by researchers.Consequently,the current thesis which fills a certain research gap is of certain theoretical and practical significance.Starting from the four dimensions of virtual community product recommendation,this thesis uses methods of comparative analysis,induction and deduction,theory transplantation to build relevant theoretical models.Data are obtained through questionnaire survey,situational experiment and interview.The relevant theoretical hypotheses are verified by empirical methods such as structural equation model,PROCESS Macro and fsQCA,and case analysis.Firstly,this thesis constructs a mediating model with moderating effects to analyze virtual community members’ dynamic mechanism of initiating product recommendations.From the perspective of Construal Level Theory and Social Exchange Theory,this thesis explores the direct effect of virtual community belonging on product recommendation intention,the mediating effect of relationship capital and the moderating effect of trust tendency.The results not only shed light on the role of sense of virtual community belonging in information sharing,but also confirm the complex roles of reciprocity tendency and social support in the process of virtual community interaction and information sharing.Secondly,based on Principle of Least Effort and Heuristic-systematic Model,this thesis analyzes the influence of subjective/objective characteristics and strong/weak styles of content of product recommendation on user’s product attitude change,and tests the buffering effects of virtual community type and personal cultural orientation on the relationship between content characteristics of product recommendation and user’s product attitude.The results provide theoretical and practical references for further understanding the impact of content characteristics of product information on consumers’ product attitude change.Thirdly,this thesis takes perceived usefulness,perceived trust and previous product recommendation experience into a model to study the psychological mechanism of user’s adoption of product recommendation,and explores the antecedents of perceived usefulness and perceived trust from the perspective of Prospect Theory and Group-trust Theory.The results show that perceived cost performance,perceived involvement and perceived risk have significant effects on perceived usefulness,and that perceived information quality,perceived cost performance and perceived risk have significant effects on perceived trust.However,the effects of perceived information quality and perceived social value on perceived usefulness,and the effects of perceived social value and perceived involvement on perceived trust have not been verified by the results.Finally,this thesis explores the impact of users’ behavior of product recommendations on corporations’ sustainable advantage acquisition.Based on previous literature,this thesis first analyzes the theoretical connotation of the user-centricity mode,and then studies the specific influences of the user-centricity model on the organizing structures and operation processes of enterprises by extracting from the case data the core characteristics of usercentricity model related to the enterprise’s sustainable advantage acquisition.Based on the results of the analyses,the thesis develops a model of how to gain sustainable advantage under the new situation of competition and gives specific management suggestions to enterprises.