Financial service providers continually struggle to attract and maintain customer interest in their company-hosted virtual communities. These are expected to improve the low level of individual involvement and emotional attachment to financial products and services. Based on Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory, we argue that the content and type of user interaction associated with a create...

The rapid growth of virtual communities has created a new interest in researchers. Indeed, understanding these communities is especially relevant because it may allow for the obtaining of valuable information (e.g. needs of particular groups of people). In this respect, this work tries to explore which factors motivate individuals to take part of a virtual community since participation is one o...

Introduction The Internet was not invented for education at beginning (Pett Grabinger, 1995), but it has influenced educational systems considerably, especially by providing another way for distance learning. This powerful communication function is superior to any other educational media. Students can conduct their own self-directed learning without interacting with others in an online learning...

Virtual communities enable one to pretend to be a different person or to possess a different identity at little or no cost. Despite the ubiquity of such communities, there is only limited theoretical and empirical research on how taking on a different identity is associated with one’s contributive behavior in those communities. Drawing on the social psychology literature, we adopt the concept o...

Online investing has seen a rapid growth. It has provided individual investors with the ability to control their own investments. Individual investors use virtual investment communities (VICs) to seek, disseminate and share relevant information. VICs are one of the largest subsets of virtual communities. Yet, very little is known about what contributes to the success of VICs. This research unde...

The variety of social networks and virtual communities has created problematic for users of different ages and preferences; in addition, since the true nature of groups is not clearly outlined, users are uncertain about joining various virtual groups and usually face the trouble of joining the undesired ones. As a solution, in this study, we introduced the hybrid community recommender system wh...

In virtual communities (e.g., forums, blogs), modeling the trust of community members is an effective way to help members make decisions about whose information is more valuable. Towards this goal, we first formulate hypotheses on how various interaction attributes influence trust in virtual communities, and validate these hypotheses through experiments on real data. The influential attributes ...

This paper is a study of one of the “unknown” segments of the Internet non-profit ventures in the Russian language. Based on the understanding of the concept of virtual community we consider the family of free publishing literary websites. We discuss their experience to demonstrate their contribution not only to the national culture, but also to the creation of open and democratic society in th...