Title: Incentive strategies in user community of online trading platform - bilateral market uncertainty perspective

Authors: Zhihao Chen; Xueni Li; Xiaoling Li

Addresses: Electronic Commerce Department, Business Administration School, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, 182# Nanhu Avenue, East Lake High-tech Development Zone, Wuhan, 430073, China ' Electronic Commerce Department, Business Administration School, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, 182# Nanhu Avenue, East Lake High-tech Development Zone, Wuhan, 430073, China ' Electronic Commerce Department, Business Administration School, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, 182# Nanhu Avenue, East Lake High-tech Development Zone, Wuhan, 430073, China

Abstract: User community plays an important role in online trading platforms. It provides users a place to communicate, to solve problems and to exchange information with each other on an online trading platform which faced a bilateral market-seller and buyer participants. Beginning with the incentive strategy, this paper studies the influence of material and spiritual incentive strategies on online trading platform. In addition, the authors take bilateral market uncertainty as a moderator into consideration. By doing an empirical research of hard data from a representative domestic online trading platform, the result shows us that: 1) both material and spiritual incentive strategies have significant effects on improving the community user loyalty; 2) both material and spiritual incentive strategies are almost equally beneficial in high seller user uncertainty; while spiritual incentive is more useful in high buyer user uncertainty.

Keywords: incentive strategies; bilateral market uncertainty; user loyalty; virtual organisations; online trading platforms; user communities; online communities virtual communities; web based communities; high seller uncertainty.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2013.051748

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2013 Vol.12 No.1, pp.14 - 26

Published online: 31 Mar 2014 *

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