The Influence Of Herding On The Adoption Of Online Reviews In Virtual Communities

With the development of Web2.0 era,virtual community has become an important platform for users to share online comments.Compared with traditional offline community,virtual community not only has sociality and information sharing,but also has timeliness of comments.Virtual community provides more opportunities for online users to share online reviews.However,massive online review data causes serious information overload,which makes it difficult for online users to make rational judgments in a short time when facing complex data.Therefore,how to make a reasonable information decision for online users is worth studying.This paper takes virtual community as the research background,on the basis of combing the existing literature,from the three directions of community support,community identity and effort cost,explores the influence factors of herding and the influence of herding on information adoption.Through reading a large number of literature at home and abroad,this paper first defines the concept of herding in this study,and determines the influencing variables of herding behavior and puts forward the research model by studying the relevant theories such as community support,community identity and effort cost.Secondly,through online questionnaire data collection,and using structural equation model to carry out empirical research on the questionnaire data,to verify the establishment of the model and hypothesis.The results show that community support has a positive impact on herding,that is,the higher the degree of social identity of online users,the higher the possibility of herding in online community,and the stronger the herd mentality of online users.Community identity has a positive impact on online users' imitation of others.The effort cost of community information screening will have a negative impact on discount information.Finally,according to the research conclusions,it provides relevant suggestions for the management of community opinion leaders and the development direction of virtual community.Community managers should improve the community support for community online commentators,promote the community identity of online users,strengthen the cooperation with opinion leaders,and promote the positive effect of herding.Online users should verify information through multiple channels,keep rational thinking,avoid the negative impact of herding,and formulate reasonable information adoption strategies.