Electronic Communities in E-Business: Their Role and Issues

Authors:
P. K. Kannan;Ai-Mei Chang;Andrew B. Whinston
Affiliations:
Associate Professor of Marketing, The Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 pkannan@rhsmith.umd.edu, ph: 301-405-2188.;Professor of Systems Management, Information Resources Management College, National Defense University, Washington, D.C. 20319 chang@ndu.edu, ph:202-685-4889.;Professor of Management Sciences and Information Systems, University of Texas at Austin, TX 78712-1175 abw@uts.cc.utexas.edu, ph: 512-471-8879.
Venue:
Information Systems Frontiers
Year:
2000

Citing 4
Cited 2

Marketing information on the I-Way: data junkyard or information gold mine?

Communications of the ACM
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier

The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
The Economics of Electronic Commerce

The Economics of Electronic Commerce
The economics of freebies in exchange for consumer information on the internet: an exploratory study

International Journal of Electronic Commerce

Community driven development as participation?: involving user communities in a software design process

Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008
Theory and Analysis of Company-Sponsored Value Co-Creation

Journal of Management Information Systems

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Electronic communities are social aggregations of critical masses of people on the Internet who engage in public discussions, interactions, and information exchanges with sufficient human feeling on matters of common interest to form webs of personal relationships. Many such e-communities are rapidly evolving on the Internet, some initiated, organized, and controlled by community members themselves, some organized and controlled by marketers, and some by third parties acting as intermediaries between members and other interest groups such as marketers and advertisers. In this paper, we explore the role of e-communities as intermediaries in exchange relationships among community members and between community members and other interest groups such as marketers and advertisers from an economic perspective. In particular, we focus on the types of interactions that take place among community members and between community members and other interest groups and examine the economic and social issues involved in maintaining a healthy community. Deriving parallels from extant research in financial intermediation and social exchange theory, we explore conditions and incentive mechanisms under which such communities could develop and add value on the Internet. We also draw upon limited empirical examples from the World Wide Web to provide support to our propositions.