How Does Social Tie Influence the User Information Sharing Behavior in Social Commerce Sites

Social commerce is an extension of e-commerce in which social media is integrated with e-commerce transactions and activities to promote user contributions. Users often learn from others through a social learning process before making decisions related an information contribution or purchase on social commerce sites. Despite the extensive literature on social learning, there is a research gap regarding the impact of various sources on user information sharing behaviors. A majority of the previous studies examined the impact of social learning information from the perspective of friends or other sources (e.g., opinion leaders or friends) without considering their relative impact among different sources. We will conduct a field study and analyze a large-scale data collected from a social commerce site. We expect that friend-network information (i.e., friends' purchase behavior and friends' sharing behavior) and opinion leader-network information (i.e., opinion leaders' purchase behavior and opinion leaders' sharing behavior) have similar effect on user information sharing behavior. Follower-network information has a greatest influence on user information sharing behavior relative to the friend-network information and opinion leader-network information. In addition, the number of followers has a non-linear relationship with user information sharing behavior. This study has important implications for both theory and practice.