What Bring to Positive Behavioral Intention of Transaction Virtual Community Participants

Abstract

As the rapid growth of e-commerce, how to convert participants into royal members or customers has become the major issue. The technology acceptance model (TAM) was the most popular theory to explain end-user's behavior towards information technology. How-ever, it stresses more the influence of information systems on consumer behavior and ignores the effect of social and psychological factors. Social identity theory provides a theoretical background to explain how psychological factors influence participant behavior. This re-search integrated both TAM and social identity theory to explore the factors affecting the positive behavioral intention of transaction virtual community (VC) members, so this study contributes to refine theory relating to behavioral intention in digital context. Research findings show that web service quality will enhance participants' social identification. Social identification will bring participants to positive behavioral intention, including spread pos-itive electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), get information, and purchase intention. Finally, social identification is more powerful than web service quality. Traditionally, practitioners of transaction VC focus more on technological factors. These findings bring new insights for them.