How Value Homophily Between Ideators and Commenter Influences Ideators’ Subsequent Online Engagement

Abstract

This study examines the motivation of user engagement in online innovation communities from a new perspective of the value homophily between the ideators and commenters instead of focusing on the interaction behavior as past research did. Specifically, this study highlights how value homophily inferred from ideators and commenters’ shared knowledge background in the online community assists them to identify credible learning sources and learn from them and how this process influences their further engagement behavior. We propose that value homophily between ideators and commenters implies that the commenter is a credible learning source, which effectively promotes the ideator to absorb and integrate the focal comment into subsequent engagement behaviors. Besides, this study further examines the moderation effect of past experience of public recognition and failure. The findings suggest that ideators’ past failures like low social support positively moderate the main effects by adjusting the ideator’s perception of the credibility of the commenter resulting in an increasing salience of value homophily between them. While commenters’ past recognition will not strengthen the main effect if they share no knowledge background with the ideators. Using a sample of 168074 observations from an online innovation community from 2011 to 2020, the findings support our theoretical predictions.