Gamification In Online Communities

The Internet era has spawned many Internet products,and online community has become one of the most created products.User activity and continuance intention are the key factors that affect the success of the product,and thus have gained vast attention from researchers and practitioners.Previous research has found that group identity has a significant influence on user participation.The Expectation Confirmation Model(ECM)considers that the expectation-performance discrepancy after users use the product can affect their perceived usefulness and satisfaction with the product,and therefore,impact the user's continuance intention of using the product.At the same time,related research on gamification has found its stimulating effect on user participation.Based on that,this research aims at more novelty gamification element “topic-based PK”,to explore the relation between topic-based PK/user participation and continuance intention in the context of online communities.In addition,this research also intends to explore the mediating and moderating role of group identity and self-uncertainty,based on the Social Identity Theory(SDT)and Uncertainty-Identity Theory(UIT).This research consists of two experiments.Experiment 1 is a field experiment,based on an Internet product with 20,000 users as samples.Using single factor(topic-based PK,topic-free PK)between-subjects design,subjects are randomly divided into topic-based PK groups and topic-free PK groups.The analysis of variance shows that the number of comments and the retention rate of the topic PK group are significantly higher than those of the topic-free PK group.Experiment 2 is a laboratory experiment,using two-factor 2(topic-based PK,topic-free PK)? 3(high self-uncertainty,control group,low selfuncertainty)between-subjects design.180 samples were randomly divided into 6 groups.The results show that topic-based PK positively predicts the number of reviews,the quality of reviews,and the continuance intention.Self-uncertainty positively moderates the relation between topic PK and group identity,and also moderates the mediating role of group identity in topic PK and number of reviews,quality of reviews,and continuance intention.The results can provide suggestions for the application of topic PK in online communities,and provide reference opinions for the specific design of topic PK from the perspective of Uncertainty-Identity Theory(UIT).