Online games are garnering large numbers of gamers, stimulating strong competition among game developers, who continue to explore new ways to increase the amount of time players spend on such games. Online games require players to concentrate on game content, seek knowledge and learn how to complete in-game tasks. However, past research has not examined how knowledge seeking intensity, which likely strengthens knowledge schemas and helps foster game loyalty and use, motivates online gameplay. To address this research gap, we draw on schema theory to construct a research model and test it using both survey and system-captured data from 385 players. We found that knowledge seeking intensity has a stronger effect than does in-game flow on enhancing players’ knowledge schemas and learning satisfaction, thus facilitating their goal progress and further strengthening their game loyalty and actual game use. We modelled and examined the mechanism underlying the influence of knowledge seeking intensity and in-game flow on knowledge schemas. Specifically, we suggest that game developers should establish actionable strategies by urging players to seek more in-game knowledge that ensures players’ further engagement.

Prior research has found that teams using computer-mediated communication (CMC) often make poor decisions because team members fail to pay attention to the information they receive from others. We developed a process designed to focus team members’ attention on one aspect of decision-making at a time. We divided the group decision-making process into three phases: 1) an initial period to contribute information, 2) a middle period of silence (i.e., no typing) to read others’ contributions, and 3) a final period to discuss the information. We designed a lab experiment to compare the information processing and decision-making of teams using this text-based CMC process to teams using text-based CMC with no intervention. Teams that used this CMC process contributed more information, recalled more information, committed fewer errors, and made better decisions. The effect sizes were large, about two times greater than the average effect sizes for the use of CMC. An examination of this new process suggests that it improved decision quality mostly by helping teams avoid errors.

Lack of user participation and contribution has been a long-standing problem for online communities. We proposed and examined new strategies for cultivating opinion leadership and enabling users to post articles outside of the community theme. We used social role theory to propose that online communities should encourage highly committed users to take administrator roles, which will increase their opinion leadership and contributions to both public spaces and their own user-controlled spaces. We collected multiple-wave and multiple-source data from 1,115 users of a large online community. The results indicate that encouraging users to take administrator roles increases their community contributions.

Knowledge sharing is a difficult task for most organizations, and there are many reasons for this. In this article, we propose that the nature of the knowledge shared and an individual's social network influence employees to find more value in person‐to‐person knowledge sharing, which could lead them to bypass the codified knowledge provided by a knowledge management system (KMS). We surveyed employees of a workman's compensation board in Canada and used social network analysis and hierarchical linear modeling to analyze the data. The results show that knowledge complexity and knowledge teachability increased the likelihood of finding value in person‐to‐person knowledge transfer, but knowledge observability did not. Contrary to expectations, whether the knowledge was available in the KMS had no impact on the value of person‐to‐person knowledge transfer. In terms of the social network, individuals with larger networks tended to perceive more value in the person‐to‐person transfer of knowledge than those with smaller networks.

Delays have become one of the most often cited complaints of web users. Long delays often cause users to abandon their searches, but how do tolerable delays affect information search behavior? Intuitively, we would expect that tolerable delays should induce decreased information search. We conducted two experiments and found that as delay increased, a point occurs at which time within‐page information search increases; that is, search behavior remained the same until a tipping point occurs where delay increases the depth of search. We argue that situation normality explains this phenomenon; users have become accustomed to tolerable delays up to a point (our research suggests between 7 and 11 s), after which search behavior changes. That is, some delay is expected, but as delay becomes noticeable but not long enough to cause the abandonment of search, an increase occurs in the “stickiness” of webpages such that users examine more information on each page before moving to new pages. The net impact of tolerable delays was counterintuitive: tolerable delays had no impact on the total amount of data searched in the first experiment, but induced users to examine more data points in the second experiment.