Internet Research

Yang, Zhenbin; Ha, Sangwook; Kankanhalli, Atreyi; Um, Sungyong

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-07-2021-0463

This study aims to examine factors influencing potential commercial innovators' intention to innovate with open government data (OGD) via a risk perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop a theoretical model that explains how different forms of uncertainty (i.e. financial, technology, competitive, demand, and data) and their inter-relationships influence potential commercial innovators' intention to innovate with OGD. The model is tested using survey data collected from 144 potential commercial innovators from a developed Asian country.FindingsThe results suggest that all other forms of uncertainty, except competitive uncertainty, negatively influence potential commercial innovators' intention to innovate, mediated by their perceived risk of innovating with OGD. The results also show positive relationships between different forms of uncertainty, i.e. competitive and financial, demand and competitive, data and financial uncertainty.Originality/valueThis paper identifies major forms of innovation uncertainty, perceived risk, their inter-relationships, and impacts on the intention to innovate with OGD. It also finds support for a unique form of uncertainty for OGD innovation (i.e. data uncertainty).

Li, Jing; Xu, Xin; Ngai, Eric W.T.

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-03-2021-0143

This study clarifies the integration-related effects of photos and text on consumer information processing and decision-making outcomes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted an experiment by recruiting 162 workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk. These participants were randomly assigned based on a full factorial, between-subject design with four possible conditions (2 [separate vs alternate layout] × 2 [photo-first vs text-first sequence]). The authors conducted a two-way analysis of variance to test the main effects and the interaction effects of layout and sequence on perceived diagnosticity, pleasantness feelings and attitudes toward products or services reviewed through electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM); the authors also applied Process Models 4 and 8 to explore the mechanism of these effects.FindingsThe experimental results reveal that text-first sequence is generally more effective than photo-first sequence in enhancing perceived diagnosticity and attitudes toward products or services. However, when a photo is displayed first, a separate layout is more effective than an alternate layout in enhancing perceived diagnosticity and attitudes. By contrast, regardless of the sequence, an alternate layout is more effective than a separate layout in inducing pleasantness feeling.Research limitations/implicationsFuture studies should further explore photo-based e-WOM, including other photo characteristics (e.g. visual quality, quantity and content).Practical implicationsThis study provides guidelines for businesses to use photos on social media to achieve strategic goals.Originality/valueThis study addresses an identified need; that is, how the presentation of photo cues (e.g. layout and sequence) influences consumer decisions.

Lu, Baozhou; Xu, Tailai; Wang, Ziqi

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-03-2021-0155

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the innovativeness-related language of crowdfunding pitches on funding outcomes under different boundary conditions specified by two context-relevant signals, entrepreneurial passion and social endorsement.Design/methodology/approachThis study develops six hypotheses about the focal impacts of innovativeness-related language (i.e. incremental and radical) and the moderating effects of entrepreneurial passion and social endorsement. The hypotheses are tested with a sample of 1,057 real projects collected from a typical platform with a computer-aided content analysis method.FindingsThis study finds that pitches containing more incremental innovativeness language can generate more funds and that those containing more radical innovativeness language can lead to less favorable funding outcomes. While incremental innovativeness language interacts with entrepreneurial passion language to positively affect funding outcomes, radical innovativeness language requires social endorsement to diminish its negative effect on funding outcomes.Research limitations/implicationsThis study demonstrates that the content of messages of entrepreneurial narratives does indeed drive funding success in the context of reward-based crowdfunding and confirms the relevance of the consumer perspective of reward-based crowdfunding by using a real dataset.Originality/valueThis work joins a number of entrepreneurial narrative studies investigating the impacts of the innovativeness-related language of pitches (issue-relevant content) and their interactions with informational signals (i.e. entrepreneurial passion and social endorsement) on funding outcomes in the context of reward-based crowdfunding.

Deng, Manting

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-06-2021-0398

Organizations have widely adopted enterprise social media (ESM) to realize workplace communication visibility linked to employee knowledge management and in-role job performance. Managers still face challenges in understanding whether communication visibility in the workplace stimulates employee extra-role voice behavior. In this study, self-regulation theory is applied to explore the mediating role of feedback-seeking on the association between communication visibility and employee voice.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire survey was carried out on 219 working professionals in China who use ESM in their respective organizations.FindingsResults show that employee feedback inquiry considerably mediates the relationship between communication visibility and voice. However, employee feedback monitoring shows no mediating role.Research limitations/implicationsPractitioners and managers must pay greater attention to the effects of communication visibility on employee extra-role voice behavior. In addition, when adopting ESM, employee self-regulation strategies can be implemented to gain the value of communication visibility.Originality/valueThis study presents the relationships among communication visibility, feedback-seeking and employee voice. Knowledge of communication visibility is extended by exploring its effects on employee voice. The current study also reveals the mediating mechanism underlying the associations between communication visibility and employee voice based on self-regulation theory.

Zhang, Yafei; Dong, Chuqing; Cheng, Yuan

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-05-2021-0290

This study seeks to understand the communication factors associated with effective social media for nonprofit organizations (NPOs). Specifically, the study investigated how interactive and emotional communication strategies influence public engagement in different ways, and how the effects differ by service-oriented and other types of NPOs.Design/methodology/approachUsing computer-assisted textual and emotional analyses, the authors examined the functional interactivity, contingency interactivity and emotion elements of 301,559 tweets from the 100 largest US nonprofits. Negative binomial regression was applied to test the relationships among these elements and public engagement on Twitter (i.e. likes and retweets).FindingsFindings revealed negative effects of functional interactivity on likes, negative effects of contingency interactivity on likes and retweets but a positive effect of functional interactivity on retweets. The findings also showed negative effects of emotion valence on likes and retweets but positive effects of emotion strength on likes and retweets. There were varying effects of interactivity and emotion on public engagement for service-oriented and other types of NPOs.Originality/valueThis study advances the nonprofit social media scholarship in several ways. First, this study suggests a clear yet largely ignored distinction in the effects of functional and contingency interactivity on public engagement. Second, this study is an early attempt to examine the role and impact of emotion elements in nonprofit social media success without downplaying the role of interactivity. Third, this study is one of the earliest attempts to include interaction effects for different types of NPOs. Last, this study contributes to the organizational social media use research by demonstrating the benefits of computer-assisted approaches in processing text data on social media. From a practical perspective, this study provides strategic guidelines for NPOs to design effective communication contents and improve their public engagement on social media.

Lin, Feiyan; Tian, Hengqi; Zhao, Jing; Chi, Maomao

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-05-2021-0292

E-commerce content platforms are a typical type of multi-sided platform that combines transactions with social media platforms. To solve the managerial dilemma of balancing the tension between control and autonomy of influencers' output performance, this study aims to investigate how exercising output controls through performance rewards and performance punishments impact the quantity and quality of influencers' content generation.Design/methodology/approachChoosing JD WeChat Shopping Circle as the research context and leveraging the introduction of a double commission subsidy policy and a removal policy as quasi-natural experiments, this study applied the difference-in-differences (DID) method to empirically test hypotheses.FindingsPerformance rewards incentivize influencers to generate high-quality content, but such incentivizing effects attenuate over time. Performance punishment drives influencers to generate expected pieces of high-quality content, and such safeguarding effects accentuate over time.Originality/valueThis study proposes output controls as an important form of governance mechanism in multi-sided platforms and substantiates how rewards and punishments as two facets of incentives affect complementors' behaviors. In addition, by distinguishing performance-contingent rewards from completion-contingent rewards, this study helps resolve the mixed findings on the effects of monetary rewards in the user-generated content (UGC) literature.

Zheng, Jian; Liu, Renjing; Zhong, Xingju; Zhang, Ru

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-11-2021-0800

With the continuous development of Internet technology, virtual brand communities (VBCs) have increasingly become essential fronts for enterprises and consumers to carry out professional communication and the leading platform for consumers and other consumers to engage in social and brand discussion. Meanwhile, numerous scholars began to pay attention to VBCs as their research topic. However, there is no systematic understanding of the existing literature on the VBCs research. Therefore, this study aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of VBCs research over the past twenty years.Design/methodology/approachBased on HistCite and CiteSpace software, descriptive statistics and bibliometric analysis were conducted in this study. Specifically, by adopting research cooperation network analysis, co-citation analysis of literature, cluster analysis and co-word analysis, the authors analyzed 1,157 articles on VBCs in the Web of Science database from 2000 to 2020.FindingsThis study summarizes the research of VBCs from three aspects. First, the general characteristics of VBCs literature are analyzed. Second, knowledge bases, research contents, theoretical foundations and theoretical contributions of VBCs are dug and integrated into a knowledge framework. Third, the evolution and trend of VBCs research topics are visualized and analyzed in two phases (from 2005 to 2012 and from 2013 to 2020).Originality/valueThis study describes the research status, knowledge structure and famous topics of VBCs research over the past twenty years. Further, the research topics for VBCs have maintained continuity in the last twenty years. Furthermore, the research topics have also been evolving with the development of network technology and changes in the external environment. These results also provide valuable clues about this field's future directions and practical implications.

Lee, Jiyoung; Britt, Brian C.; Kanthawala, Shaheen

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-02-2021-0120

Misinformation (i.e. information identified as false) spreads widely and quickly on social media – a space where crowds of ordinary citizens can become leading voices – during a crisis when information is in short supply. Using the theoretical lenses of socially curated flow and networked gatekeeping frameworks, we address the following three aims: First, we identify emergent opinion leaders in misinformation-related conversations on social media. Second, we explore distinct groups that contribute to online discourses about misinformation. Lastly, we investigate the actual dominance of misinformation within disparate groups in the early phases of mass shooting crises.Design/methodology/approachThis paper used network and cluster analyses of Twitter data that focused on the four most prevalent misinformation themes surrounding the El Paso mass shooting.FindingsA total of seven clusters of users emerged, which were classified into five categories: (1) boundary-spanning hubs, (2) broadly popular individuals, (3) reputation-building hubs, (4) locally popular individuals and (5) non-opinion leaders. Additionally, a content analysis of 128 tweets in six clusters, excluding the cluster of non-opinion leaders, further demonstrated that the opinion leaders heavily focused on reiterating and propagating misinformation (102 out of 128 tweets) and collectively made zero corrective tweets.Originality/valueThese findings expand the intellectual understanding of how various types of opinion leaders can shape the flow of (mis)information in a crisis. Importantly, this study provides new insights into the role of trans-boundary opinion leaders in creating an echo chamber of misinformation by serving as bridges between otherwise fragmented discourses.

Liu, Xuan; Lin, Shan; Jiang, Shan; Chen, Ming; Li, Jia

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-03-2021-0189

The authors empirically examined social capital factors affecting patients' social support acquisition with the aim of providing guidance to patients seeking social support online.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used social network analysis to extract data about social capital factors from online health communities and text mining to identify forms of informational support and emotional support grounded in online, text-based communication. Moreover, the authors employed a random coefficient model to understand the dynamic influence of social capital factors on both informational and emotional support.FindingsThe results from the empirical analyses show that structural connections have a lasting impact on the acquisition of both types of support; that is, social connections developed in the past will have an effect on the future. For relational capital, strong ties were less important; the quantity of connections mattered more than the quality when acquiring informational support. The use of health-related language increased the amount of informational support acquired. Over time, patients gained increasing social support, which primarily came from the patients' historical threads, likely via searches from peers facilitated by accumulated social capital.Originality/valueThe authors' research adds to the literature on social capital and social support in online health communities by exploring how the three dimensions of social capital affect social support acquisition. The authors' research also contributes to the online health care literature by examining social support from a dynamic perspective. Practically, the authors' findings provide guidance for patients on what decisions to make to acquire more social support.

Liu, Ying; Liu, Yongmei; Xiao, Bo Sophia

2023 Internet Research

doi: 10.1108/intr-11-2020-0671

This study explored whether crowdsourcing work characteristics are associated with perceived work effort in competitive crowdsourcing markets. The study also investigated the important contextual variables and internal mechanisms related to perceived work effort.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire was posted as a crowdsourcing task on China's Time Fortune website. Data from 231 valid questionnaires were analyzed using SmartPLS 3.FindingsCrowdsourcing workers' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations were significantly and positively correlated with their perceived work effort. Task autonomy and feedback were significantly and positively correlated with intrinsic motivation. Skill variety, task significance, task identity, and task clarity had no significant correlations with intrinsic motivation. However, task clarity was significantly and positively correlated with perceived work effort. Moreover, the relationship between workers' trust in task requesters and perceived work effort was fully mediated by intrinsic motivation.Originality/valueThis study extended the job characteristic model into the virtual competitive crowdsourcing market. The authors verified the relationship between task clarity/trust in task requesters and workers' motivation and perceived work effort.