Purpose: Travel companies are increasingly hosting online communities to extend their initiatives of customer relationship management and gain additional insight into their business. While the benefits to companies from hosting online communities are clear, another closely related issue has not been given comparative attention: Why do customers engage voluntarily in online travel communities? The purpose of this paper is to answer the question by developing and testing a conceptual model that exploring the influence of socialization interactions on customer engagement with the community. Design/methodology/approach: Hypotheses were tested by applying structural equation modeling based on survey data collected from an online travel community (n=665). Findings: The results supported the research hypotheses and demonstrated that socialization interactions (i.e. information and social exchange) in the online travel community are important catalysts for customer engagement. Originality/value: The contribution of this study is twofold. First, from a theoretical perspective, it offers new insights into the conceptualization of customer engagement and its antecedents in the context of the online travel community. Second, from a pragmatic perspective, the conceptual model derived from this research aids practitioners in stimulating customer engagement from the perspective of socialization interactions.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the factors influencing content generation and community initiative in PESCs. Taking advantage of an emerging PESC – Xiaohongshu APP, the study identifies three antecedent resources, including customer-owned knowledge, harmonious passion to shopping and perceived information usefulness, that affect content generating and further community initiative.Design/methodology/approach: Based on the service-dominant (S-D) logic model and resource integration related work, the authors proposed a conceptual framework empirically tested using data of a survey and the real content-generating behavior from 347 respondents.Findings: This paper identifies three resource antecedents of content generating behavior with significant influence. Furthermore, there is a moderating effect of perceived information usefulness among these three resources, which echoes the concept of resource integration. Content generating has a significant and positive influence on community initiative.Originality/value: First, the paper identified customer and platform resources promoting the prosperity of PESCs, enhancing the research on antecedents of community prosperity. Second, the paper empirically quantifies the process and outcome of resource integration conceptual model. Third, it enriches the understanding of C2C interaction by investigating the value creation process on PESCs. Moreover, findings in the study provide insights for community managers to improve the operation of PESCs.

Peer-to-peer sharing accommodation commerce has witnessed unprecedented rapid development in recent years, which relies much on the contribution of service providers who largely control the servicescapes by providing both housing assets and relevant services. Differentiating from customers’ perspective in most previous studies, we focus on the behaviour intentions and explore the influence mechanism from the perspective of service providers. Based on the socio-technical systems theory, the results show that the technical enabler (perceived usefulness) and social enablers (perceived control, perceived familiarity, and self-investment) positively affect service providers’ attitude towards platform use and further influence their behaviour intentions (namely, online interacting intention and willingness to charge a lower price). Besides, the existence of offline interaction between service providers and customers counter-intuitively weakens the positive effect of service providers’ attitude toward platform use on their behavioural intentions. The research is of particular interest to the industry platform managers by showing why they need to concern about providers’ performance and how they can boost providers’ better usage.