The rapid development of short-video social network platforms provides us with an opportunity to conduct health-related advertising and recommendation. However, so far, there are no empirical evidence on whether users are willing to accept health-related short-video advertisements. Here, acceptance refers to purchase intention, meaning that users will read short-video ads, share ads with others, or even open the product link embedded in ads to purchase the product. In this paper, we make the first attempt to model and quantify user acceptance of health-related short-video advertisements. Particularly, we propose a new research model that enhances the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with two new designs. First, we propose four new antecedents including social interaction, intrusiveness, informativeness, and relevance into the original TAM to reflect the features of short-video social networks. Second, we introduce two mediator variables including perceived usefulness and attitude so that we can better study how different factors affect user acceptance of health-related short-video ads. We perform a survey on the Internet and conduct an empirical analysis of the surveyed data. The results show that the four antecedents as well as the perceived ease of use have significant influences on perceived usefulness, attitude, and purchase intention. Further, perceived usefulness plays a valid mediating role in attitude and purchase intention. We also found that users’ perceived ease of use on health-related short-video ads cannot significantly predict users’ attitudes toward ads. This is a new finding in social media-oriented ads. Finally, we integrate the empirical findings and present reasonable suggestions for advertisers and marketers to promote health-related short-video ads.

Social networks introduce new potential for people to share knowledge with others. However, it is not clear what factors influence user willingness toward knowledge sharing in social networks. Aiming to answer these questions, in this paper we analyze the major factors influencing user willingness toward knowledge sharing in social networks and propose a new research model that is inspired by the technology acceptance model (TAM). In particular, we introduce a new independent variable called perceived value which is described by four aspects: social value, entertainment value, emotion value, and information value. In addition, we introduce a new mediating variable, trust, to reflect the intermediating relationship between perceived value and knowledge-sharing willingness. We conduct an empirical analysis on questionnaire data and present comprehensive results on reliability and validity, factor analysis, correlation analysis, and mediating effects analysis. The results show that perceived value has a significant impact on knowledge-sharing willingness, and trust plays a partial intermediate role between perceived value and knowledge-sharing willingness. Further, we present some research implications for knowledge sharing and learning innovation in social networks, as well as some suggestions for organizations to advance knowledge sharing and learning innovation in the social-network age.

Electronic proceedings of IJCAI 2020

The advancement of mobile internet technology has enabled companies to leverage social media for e-commerce, where some use personified images and language to communicate with consumers. This paper investigates how personified communication affects consumer behavior in social commerce and whether consumers are willing to accept this new form of communication. Specifically, the study explores consumers’ willingness to accept personified communication in social commerce, considering the role of cognitive needs in regulating the internal mechanism. The paper proposes suggestions for enterprises to improve their social media communication and presents an improved model based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The model introduces perceived interaction as a new independent variable and adds cognitive needs as a regulatory variable, which is more suitable for social commerce. The study conducts a questionnaire survey online and analyzes the data using AMOS and SPSS. The results demonstrate that perceived usefulness and perceived interaction positively impact consumers’ attitudes, which subsequently influences their willingness to purchase. Furthermore, cognitive needs as a regulatory variable significantly affect the path from perceived usefulness to attitude and purchase intention.

With the development of social networks and the Internet-based sharing economy, shared short-term rentals are emerging as a new kind of service that provides a convenient way for people to buy short-term rental services in cities through social-network-enabled platforms. However, like other social-network-based services, shared short-term rental is also likely to be impacted by online reviews. This paper aims to investigate the impact of online reviews on users’ purchase decisions toward shared short-term rentals, and further to provide optimization suggestions for the future advance of shared short-term rentals. The contributions of this paper are many-fold. First, we introduce the Stimuli-Organism-Response (SOR) model into the study and propose new variables for the model, including stimulus variables, organism variables, response variable, and moderating variables. Second, we propose eight hypotheses to evaluate the impact of online reviews on users’ purchase decisions toward shared short-term rentals. Finally, we collect data through a questionnaire survey and present comprehensive results on many aspects. Based on the data analysis, we find out that the quality of online reviews impacts users’ perceived value and perceived risk, which in turn impacts users’ purchase decisions toward shared short-term rentals. In addition, the cognitive needs of users can adjust the impact of online reviews on the perceived risk of users but have no explicit adjusting effect for users’ perceived value. Further, we present some research implications as well as suggestions for rental platforms to advance shared short-term rentals in the Internet age.