Fix my street or else: using the internet to voice local public service concerns
Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Theory and practice of electronic governance
Understanding participant loyalty intentions in virtual communities
WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications
'Helpfulness' in online communities: a measure of message quality
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Communicative practices in an online financial forum during abnormal stock market behavior
Information and Management
A multilabel text classification algorithm for labeling risk factors in SEC form 10-K
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS)
Knowledge Collaboration in Online Communities
Organization Science
The cognitive selection framework for knowledge acquisition strategies in virtual communities
International Journal of Information Management: The Journal for Information Professionals
ExpertRank: A topic-aware expert finding algorithm for online knowledge communities
Decision Support Systems
An investigation of information sharing and seeking behaviors in online investment communities
Computers in Human Behavior
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Virtual communities are a significant source of information for consumers and businesses. This research examines how users value virtual communities and how virtual communities differ in their value propositions. In particular, this research examines the nature of trade-offs between information quantity and quality, and explores the sources of positive and negative externalities in virtual communities. The analyses are based on more than 500,000 postings collected from three large virtual investing-related communities (VICs) for 14 different stocks over a period of four years. The findings suggest that the VICs engage in differentiated competition as they face trade-offs between information quantity and quality. This differentiation among VICs, in turn, attracts users with different characteristics. We find both positive and negative externalities at work in virtual communities. We propose and validate that the key factor that determines the direction of network externalities is posting quality. The contributions of the study include the extension of our understanding of the virtual community evaluation by users, the exposition of competition between virtual communities, the role of network externalities in virtual communities, and the development of an algorithmic methodology to evaluate the quality (noise or signal) of textual data. The insights from the study provide useful guidance for design and management of VICs.