Incentive strategies in user community of online trading platform - bilateral market uncertainty perspective

Abstract

User community plays an important role in online trading platforms. It provides users a place to communicate, to solve problems and to exchange information with each other on an online trading platform which faced a bilateral market-seller and buyer participants. Beginning with the incentive strategy, this paper studies the influence of material and spiritual incentive strategies on online trading platform. In addition, the authors take bilateral market uncertainty as a moderator into consideration. By doing an empirical research of hard data from a representative domestic online trading platform, the result shows us that (1) both material and spiritual incentive strategies have significant effects on improving the community user loyalty; (2) both material and spiritual incentive strategies are almost equally beneficial in high seller user uncertainty; while spiritual incentive is more useful in high buyer user uncertainty.