Research On The Impact Of Bots On Collaboration Structure In Online Community

As a virtual organizational form,online communities(OC)have become one of the most popular organization forms for enterprises and the public to create economic value.The collaboration structure in OC determines its collaboration performance,and it is affected by various technologies.As one of the emerging technologies of OC,bots has gradually changed its roles,processes,and collaboration structures with its increasing availability.Research on the impact of bots on collaboration structure of OC is particularly important,however,the current research on the impact of technology on organization structure lacks attention to the online environment,few researches of bot's influence on OC on the group-level influence,and most of studies are based on case studies or descriptive statistical analysis rather than empirical evidence and dynamic explanations.Therefore,empirical research and computational experiments are comprehensively used in this paper to respectively construct an empirical research model of the impact of bots on the collaboration structure and a computational experiment model of OC collaboration involving bots,to explore the impact of bots on collaboration structure.Firstly,based on Barley's theory of technology and structure,consider the influence relationships between bots,the specialization of core members and peripheral members,the tie strength of these two roles,and the density and centralization of collaboration structures,an empirical research model of the impact of bots on collaboration structure is constructed.Secondly,based on the revision data of Wikipedia,a typical OC,the Difference in Difference Model(DID)and the mediation effect test method are used to test the influence relationship between bots,roles,and collaboration structure,and find the influence mechanism of bots on the collaboration structure.Thirdly,based on the Virtual Design Team model(VDT),the Coordination Theory and other theories are integrated to construct an agent-based computational experiment model of OC collaboration involving bots,including human members and bots(actor agents),task agents and evolution rules,and the model is calibrated and verified based on real data.Then,by adjusting related parameters such as the proportion of bot's participation,bot intelligence level,human team composition and task characteristics,sensitivity analysis and visual analysis are used to discover the evolutionary rules of the collaboration structure of OC involving bots.Finally,by comparing the conclusions of empirical research and computational experiments,this paper reveals the impact of bots on the collaboration structure.Based on the above experimental results,this paper discovers the influence rules of bots on collaboration structure,as well as the mediation effect of roles,reveals the influence mechanism of bots on the collaboration structure.Furthermore,this paper also discovers the evolutionary rules of the collaboration structure of OC under different proportion of bot's participation,as well as the moderator effects of bot intelligence level,human team composition and task characteristics,reveals the evolutionary rules of the collaboration structure of OC involving bots.The conclusions of this paper extend the application of traditional offline organization theories on the online environment,enrich the online community collaboration theory,and provide practical enlightenment for online community managers.