As more and more review platforms add social networking services, the majority of platforms have evolved into a binary social-commercial environment. In this particular context, readers assess review posters with dual roles in the decision-making process: friend role and reviewer role. Unlike previous studies from a single-role perspective, this study develops a dual-role model for exploring review helpfulness mechanisms based on role theory. More importantly, this study further investigates whether contextual cues of trust transfer affect the interaction effect of the dual role. We first apply a qualitative methodology by using semi-structured interviews with 32 readers of review platforms to extract the relevant dimensions of the dual role. Then, using actual online review data collected from Pconline.com in China, we conduct an econometric analysis to test our hypotheses. The results confirm the interaction of reviewers’ dual roles and the effect of contextual cues of trust transfer in a dual role-based model. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Microblogs are revolutionising the way users produce, consume and distribute short content. The continuous content contributions of users are crucial for the sustainable development of microblogs. Knowledge regarding this user behaviour is scarce. Based on the uses and gratifications theory (U&G) and the social influence theory (SIT), this paper proposes an integrated research model with the aim of understanding the factors that affect users’ continuous content contribution behaviours (CCCB) on microblogs. The data were collected from 379 microblog users in China. The empirical results indicate that perceived gratification had a positive but surprisingly trivial effect on continuous content contribution behaviours. Social influence had a strong and significantly positive effect on users’ CCCB, it also had a positive moderating effect on the relationship between perceived gratification and CCCB. Users’ perceived gratification was positively affected by the antecedents of self-expression, anticipated extrinsic rewards and anticipated reciprocity but negatively affected by privacy concerns. The platform attributes of microblogs (i.e. accessibility and interactivity) also influenced users’ perceived gratification. This research contributes to social media research with regards to the theory of users’ CCCB.

The purpose of this study is to review current research activities concerning information systems (IS) in mainland China. We thus examined Chinese IS research with reference to discipline, research topic, research method, and units of analysis, identifying and reviewing a total of 604 research papers, published in 18 leading Chinese academic journals from 1999 to 2003. The results show that: (1) IS itself represents the major theoretical reference of the studies; (2) the IS research in China has clearly focused on organizational and system/software issues; (3) non empirical studies were dominant in the field of IS research in China; and (4) the majority of studies were conducted at an organizational or systemic level.