• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.399-409
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of virtual community participation and engagement in the brand decision by building community and brand trust. In this study, two theories (Social Capital Theory and Theory of Collective Action) were tested. Both theories were linked based on existing literature, and empirical evidence was obtained through testing hypotheses. Students from five prestigious Pakistani business schools provided a total of 849 replies. The measurement model and structural model were both analyzed using the partial least square (PLS) method. The findings show that virtual community engagement and participation have a positive and significant impact on virtual community trust. Although virtual community engagement has a positive effect on brand trust, we found no evidence of a link between virtual community participation and brand trust. Later, these trusts positively influence brand choice. This study has several managerial implications. The suggested model of this study helps managers to get customers' insight, choose the right target market, and set integrated marketing communication strategies besides social media marketing strategies. The study represents a new perspective of consumer behavior that helps to understand how a customer behaves in virtual communities to trust and take the final decision to purchase.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.19-45
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• 2010

Virtual Communities, which are formed on the Internet, are expected to serve the needs of members for e-collaboration, e-communication, information and knowledge sharing. The executives of organizations should consider virtual community as a new innovation or knowledge pool since members share knowledge. However, many virtual community have failed due to members' low willingness to engage and furthermore to share knowledge with other members. Thus, there is a need to understand and foster the determinants of members' sense of belonging behavior in virtual community. This study develops an integrated model designed to investigate and explain the relationships between contextual factors, personal perceptions of virtual community, usability, trust and sense of belonging in using a certain virtual community. Empirical data was collected from 201 and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) to verify the fit of the hypothetical model. The results show that the perceived usability and community trust of members significantly influences sense of belonging in using the virtual community, and information quality, system quality, familiarity on the virtual community are significantly influence the usability but not reputation. And I confirmed that perceived shared vision and responsiveness play the role of determinants in making the member's trust, perceived risk influence the making community trust in directly. The results of the study can be used to identify the motivation underlying members' sense of belonging in a certain virtual community by investigating the impacts of contextual factors and personal perceptions on virtual community, the integrated model better explains behavior than other proposed models. This study might help executives of virtual communities and organizations to manage and promote these determinants of sense of belonging to stimulate members' willingness to engage the community and futhermore enhance their virtual community loyalty.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.95-118
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• 2009

Virtual community, which is formed on the internet, is expected to serve the needs of members for communication, information, and knowledge sharing. The executives of organizations should consider operating strategy of virtual community as a new innovation or knowledge pool since members share knowledge. However, many virtual community have failed due to members' low willingness to engage and furthermore to share knowledge with other members. Thus, there is a need to understand and foster the determinants of members' loyalty in virtual community. The objective of this study is to develop an integrated model designed to investigate and explain the relationships between contextual factors, personal perceptions of virtual community, usefulness, ease of use, familiarity, members' trust, reputation, community trust, attitude, satisfaction and loyalty. Empirical data was collected from 286 internet users and tested using structural equation modeling to verify the fit of the hypothetical model. The results show that the usefulness, familiarity significantly influences attitude and members' trust is significantly influence the community trust. And I confirmed that ease of use and attitude play the role of determinants in making the satisfaction, community trust and reputation influence the satisfaction that have the direct effect to making the loyalty. The results of the study can be used to identify the loyalty in virtual community. By investigating the impacts of contextual factors and personal perceptions on virtual community, the integrated model better explains behavior than other proposed models. This study might help executives of virtual communities and organizations to manage and promote community trust, attitude, satisfaction to stimulate members' willingness to revisit the community and futhermore enhance their virtual community loyalty.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.129-150
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• 2023

Purpose - This study is based on the Theory of Planned Behavior and aims to explore the decision-making mechanisms of consumers participating in value co-creation activities within virtual brand communities. Methodology - The research involved a comprehensive survey of 405 participants from various virtual brand communities. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used for data analysis, applying SPSS and AMOS to test the hypotheses. The study focused on community rules and regulations, community experience and community trust. Results - The research found that community rules and regulations significantly impact subjective norms and perceived behavioral control, but not directly influence consumer attitudes. Community experience positively affected consumer attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control. Community trust was found to positively influence these aspects of consumer decision-making. However, a gap was identified in the direct influence of perceived behavioral control on actual consumer behavior. Implications - The findings of this study contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of factors affecting consumer behavior in virtual brand communities. It underscores the necessity for community managers to develop strategies that consider these internal decision-making mechanisms, facilitating more effective community engagement. The study also identifies a potential area for future research in the direct influence of perceived behavioral control on actual consumer behavior.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.49-69
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• 2006

The virtual community has been recognized as an effective marketing tool and has been an important motive of using internet to Internet users, but very few attempts have been done for the development of virtual community success. Although many studies have been made on influencing factors of virtual community success, the comprehensive studies have never been done so far. Therefore, this study focused on developing the comprehensive model and verifying empirically. This study proposed five influencing factors(Virtual Community Operational factor, Characteristics of Users, Usefulness, Trust, Commitment) that affect virtual community success and three success factors(Sense of Virtual Community, Loyalty, Purchasing Intention) by carrying out literature review extensively and suggesting the relationship among factors. The relationship among factors were empirically validated by structural equation modeling. The data used in this study were collected from 292 users of the existing virtual communities. As the result of statistical analysis. It was found that Virtual Community Operational Factor and Characteristics of Users statistically significantly influenced Virtual Community Success. Also, it was shown that the intervening effects of Usefulness, Trust and Commitment were statistically significant, but that the relationship between commitment and Loyalty was not statistically significant. Finally, it turned out that the causality among success variables of Virtual Community was supported, but that sense of Virtual Community was required to be measured by new measurements.

• Proceedings of the Korea Inteligent Information System Society Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.375-383
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• 2004

Despite the fact that virtual communities on the Internet have been growing at an exponential rate in recent years, little research has been done on the characteristics of virtual communities. In order to better understand and manage the activities of virtual communities, a theoretical model is proposed in this paper. The objective of this paper is to clarify the factors as they are related to the Technology Acceptance Model. In particular the relationship among identities, trust, and other factors are hypothesized. Using the Technology Acceptance Model, this research showed that the importance of identity and trust in virtual communities. The members of virtual communities interact continuously and share an identity. According to the identity type, different ways of stimulating the members are necessary in order to facilitate participation in activities of virtual communities. The virtual communities of a more utilitarian identity are more sensitive to trust in members than trust in the service provider, and members of a more utilitarian identity are inclined to exchange information with each other.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.41-72
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• 2019

Purpose Virtual communities (VCs) are becoming ever more important in these days, sometimes more than offline communities. Notably, they have become significant sources of knowledge sharing. Therefore, in order to foster a VC, it is very important to understand why people share their knowledge in the VC. Under this background, this paper aims at proposing the behavioral model best explains knowledge sharing activities in VCs. Design/methodology/approach We basically design our behavioral model for knowledge sharing in VCs based on theory of reasoned action (TRA). However, to understand knowledge sharing in VCs better, we specify knowledge sharing by dividing it into knowledge contribution and knowledge use. Also, instead of 'subjective norm', we adopt 'sense of virtual community (SOVC)' as a main social factor, which has been found to be important in the literature. We also include the antecedents such as 'quality of the shared knowledge', 'trust in community members', 'passion of the community leader', 'reciprocity', and 'self efficacy', which affect VC users' attitude towards knowledge sharing and SOVC. To test the hypotheses in our proposed model, we collected 253 valid surveys from the VC users. Structural equation modeling (SEM) using AMOS 23 is employed to assess the relationships proposed as the hypotheses. Findings Major findings are as follows. SOVC positively affects both intention to contribute knowledge and intention to use knowledge. And, trust in community members positively affects the attitude towards knowledge use and SOVC. The attitude towards knowledge use is also affected by the quality of the shared knowledge. Reciprocity is found to strongly positively affect the attitude towards knowledge contribution. However, passion of the community leader and self efficacy are found to have insignificant effect on SOVC and the attitude towards knowledge contribution respectively. Our study sheds a light on how to foster VCs from the perspective of knowledge management.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.147-165
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• 2009

Virtual community(VC) will increasingly be organized as commercial enterprises, with the objective of earning an attractive financial return by providing members with valuable resources and environment. For example, Cyworld.com in Korea uses several community services to enable customers of Cyworld to take control of their own value as potential purchasers of products and services. Although initial adoption is important for online network service success, it does not necessarily result in the desired managerial performance unless the initial usage is continuously related to the continuous usage and purchase. Particularly, the customer who receives relevant online services and is well equipped with online network services, will trust the online service provider and perceive less risk and experience more activities such as continuous usage and purchase. Thus, how to promote continued online service usage or, alternatively, how to prevent discontinuance is a critical issue for VC service providers to consider. By aggregating a wide range of information and online environments for customers and providing trust to its members, the service providers of virtual communities help to reduce the perceived risk of continuous usage and purchase. Drill down, online service managers realize that achieving strong and sustained customers who continuously use online service and purchase on it is crucial. Therefore, the research into this online service continuance will identify the relationship between the initial usage and the continuous usage and purchase. The research of continuous usage or post adoption has recently emerged as an important issue in the IS literature. Individuals' information systems(IS) continuous usage decisions are congruent with consumers' repeat purchase decisions. The TAM(Technology Acceptance Model) paradigm has been strongly confirmed across a wide range from product purchase on EC to online service usage contexts. The analysis of IS usage based on TAM has proven to be successful across almost online service contexts. However, most of previous studies have focused on only an area (i.e., VC or EC). Just little research has tried to analyze the relationship between VC and EC. The effect of some factors on user intention, captured through several theories such as TAM, has been demonstrated. Yet, few studies have explored the salient relationships of VC users' EC acceptance. To fill this gap between VC and EC research, this paper attempts to develop a research model that extends the TAM perspective in view of the additional contributions of trust in the service provider and trust in members on some factors that affect EC and VC adoption. In this extension, we applied the TAM-to-TAM(T2T) model, and analyzed the transfer effect of trust between these two TAMs. The research model was empirically tested on the context of a social network service. The model was to extend TAM with the trust concept for the virtual community environment from the perspective of tasks. By building an extended model of TAM and examining the relationships between trust and the existing variables of TAM, it is aimed to explain a user's continuous intention to use VC and purchase on EC. The unit of analysis in this paper is an individual user of a virtual community. The population of interest is the individual with the experiences in virtual community. The data for this paper was made available via a Web survey of VC users. In total, 281 cases were gathered for about one week, but there were some missing values in the sample and there were some inappropriate cases. Thus, only 248 cases were finally analyzed. We chose the structural equation analysis to test the hypotheses and it is better suited for explaining complex relationships than the other methods. In this test, AMOS was used to test the Structural Equation Model (SEM). Noticeable results have been found in the T2T model regarding the factors affecting the intention to use of virtual community and loyalty. Our result showed that trust transfer plays a key role in forming the two adoption beliefs. Overall, this study preliminarily confirms the salience of trust transfer in online service.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.65-77
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• 2011

The current study investigated how interpersonal trust is developed in online communities, where most of individual identities are unknown or doubtful. To better understand and theorize the underlying mechanism, a survey was conducted integrating the literature on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and extending previous research on social identify model. The findings confirmed that integrity, benevolence, and openness are essential components in the concept of trustworthiness, which is predicted by social identification and persistency of communication activities in the virtual community.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.135-158
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• 2016

Purpose Virtual communities change the way people communicate and share information. The purpose of this paper is to find how internet social capital and individual motivations influence the information sharing in virtual communities. This study considers the social capital theory, individual motivations, information sharing, and community promotion to construct a theoretical model. Design/methodology/approach Social capital focuses on three dimensions that include 6 factors: social interaction ties, centrality, shared language, shared vision, trust and reciprocity. Individual motivations include 2 factors: reputation and enjoy helping. To confirm the research model and the hypotheses, 426 effective questionnaires were used for the final analysis. Findings The result of data analysis demonstrates that social interaction ties, centrality, shared language, trust, and reciprocity were significant in affecting information sharing behaviors. However, reputation, enjoy helping, and shared vision does not appear to have a significant influence on information sharing behaviors. The information sharing was positively related to community promotion.