Customer Knowledge Contribution Behavior in Social Shopping Communities

Abstract

Social shopping communities, a special form of social media, have offered fertile ground for customers to communicate their opinions and exchange product information. Although social shopping communities have the potential to transform the way online customers acquire knowledge in everyday life, research in information systems has paid little attention to this emerging type of social media. Thus, the goal of this paper is to enhance our understanding of user behavior in this new form of community. We propose and empirically test an integrative theoretical model of customer knowledge contribution based on social capital theory. By analyzing panel data collected over two weeks from 2,251 customers in a social shopping community, we found that reputation, reciprocity, network centrality, as well as customer expertise have significant impact on customer knowledge contribution. These results contribute significantly to the literature and provide important implications for future research and practice.