A networking view of collaborative consumption on social media: integrating value-in-exchange and value-in-use into value co-creation

Abstract

PurposeThis study focuses on the self-organized cooperative consumption of platform participants on social media platform, and reveals how the brand owner cooperates with two-sided customers to achieve value co-creation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopted a case study approach to explore how a Chinese beauty startup developed collaborative networks from 2013 to 2022, and tracked the the changes of network structure and cooperation mechanism.FindingsThe study finds that the brand owner cooperates with two-sided customers to integrate resources and establish diverse relational trust, which enhances the evolution of a heterogeneous collaborative network for value co-creation.Originality/valueThe study builds upon traditional dyadic actor-to-actor interactions between providers and customers, develops a novel interaction framework of actor-to-network to explain the value co-creation by collaborative networking, reveals the self-organized mechanism of cooperative consumption on social media.