In order to investigate the impact of social media monitoring on a firm’s market understanding and performance, and how to manage online rumors, two complementary studies are conducted on visitors’ engagement and three aspects of engagement. The first study indicates that conversations and inbound traffic positively affect visitors’ engagement, which, along with referrals, influences social media monitoring’s impact on market understanding. Next, the impact of social media monitoring on a firm’s performance is affected by social media monitoring’s impact on market understanding. The second study indicates that first, online rumors from direct engagement are more likely to be true than those from indirect engagement, second, online rumors’ spreading shows similar engagement patterns, third, a firm’s quick and frank reaction to rumors can reduce their influence, and fourth, adding contents to online rumors increases cognitive engagement, and a company’s support or denial of online rumors affects all engagement dimensions.

Although many studies have reported that social power is a critical factor in facilitating or constraining social interactions among individuals, few studies have fully explored how social power influences an individual’s knowledge utilization within a work group. Social power in the workplace helps individuals recognize others’ knowledge and utilize it in a business context. By integrating the theory of social power with the volitional model, this study develops a theoretical model of how social power influences an individual’s positive affect, perceived transactive memory system (PTMS) levels, and knowledge utilization. The proposed model was tested using data from 320 individuals. The results show that social power significantly influences an individual’s affect and PTMS which in turn jointly influence their intention to utilize knowledge. Notably, this study reveals that different power bases have different effects on an individual’s PTMS levels within a work group.

This research addresses the theoretically neglected question of how the internal diffusion of inter-organizational systems (IOS) into a firm's activities and its external diffusion into the supply chain partners influence performance improvement. Drawing on the resource-based view, our research model posits that organizational and relational resources affect both internal and external diffusion, which in turn, influence performance improvement. Survey results from 187 managers in Korean and Chinese firms showed that while the impact of organizational resources on a firm's performance improvement was fully mediated by IOS diffusion, the diffusion partially mediates the impact of relational resources on performance improvement. This study also revealed a significantly different pattern of diffusion between Korean and Chinese firms, i.e. showing the impact of organizational and relational resources on a firm's performance through external diffusion of IOS are significantly greater in Korean firms, while the impact of internal diffusion was significantly greater in Chinese firms. In other words, Korean firms tend to externally diffuse IOS toward their business partners, while Chinese firms tend to internally diffuse IOS by deploying IOS from their partners. The implications of these findings for both research and practice are discussed.

With millions of online auctions per day, sites such as eBay have revolutionized how consumers buy and sell goods. Despite the benefits associated with online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auctions, there can be drawbacks. Consumers who purchase goods in online auctions may get caught up in auction fever, causing them to engage in overbidding, and sometimes leading to what has been referred to as the winner's curse. While several theoretical explanations have been proposed to explain overbidding behavior (OB), there has been little empirical work in this area. Drawing on escalation theory, this study develops and tests a model of the OB exhibited by individuals in online auction settings. Our model posits that certain escalation drivers such as sunk cost (SC), the completion effect (CE), and self-justification affect an individual's willingness to continue bidding (WCB) which, in turn, influences OB. Survey data collected from 250 online auction participants were used to test the model using partial least squares analysis. SC and CE were found to have significant impacts on OB that were either partially or fully mediated by WCB. We also found that competition intensity moderates the relationship between willingness to continue and OB such that when competition is more intense, the relationship becomes even stronger. The implications of these findings for both research and practice are discussed.

Given the prevalence of community-driven knowledge services (CKSs) such as Yahoo! Answers and Naver Knowledge In, it has become important to understand the effect of social networks on user behaviors in CKS environments. CKSs allow various relationships between askers and answerers as well as among answerers. This study classifies social ties in CKSs into three kinds of ties: answering ties, co-answering ties, and getting answers ties. This study examines the influence of the structural and relational attributes of social networks on the quality of answers at CKSs for answering ties, co-answering ties, and getting answers ties. Data collected from the top-100 heavy users of Yahoo! Answers and of Naver Knowledge In are used to test the research model. The analysis results show that the centrality of the answering ties significantly influences the quality of answers while the average strength of the answering ties has an insignificant effect on the quality of answers. Interestingly, both the centrality and average strength of the co-answering ties negatively affect the quality of answers. Moreover, the centrality and average strength of getting answers ties do not significantly influence the quality of answers.

Knowledge sharing, which is critical for the strategic utilization of knowledge resources for the benefit of an organization, can only take place when both knowledge contribution and knowledge seeking exist. However, most previous research has focused on only one side of this process – knowledge contribution motivations. This is despite the fact that various barriers to knowledge seeking and reuse exist, such as the effort required to seek relevant knowledge and the cost of future obligation. In overcoming such barriers, norms related to collaboration are considered to be important. However, little is known of how these norms operate in conjunction with other antecedents to influence individuals' knowledge seeking behavior. Addressing the knowledge gap, this study explores how collaborative norms in an organization impact knowledge seeking with regard to a common knowledge management system type – the electronic knowledge repository (EKR). For this purpose, we have developed a model and tested it through a survey of EKR users in knowledge-intensive organizations. Our results indicate that collaborative norms positively impact individuals' knowledge seeking behavior through EKRs, both directly and through reducing the negative effect of future obligation on seeking. However, collaborative norms could also undermine the positive impact of perceived usefulness on knowledge seeking behavior. We identify other antecedents of knowledge seeking such as knowledge growth, resource-facilitating conditions, and self-efficacy. Implications for research and knowledge sharing practice are discussed.