Using the Network-Based Theory for Monitoring Sustainable Interconnectedness on e-Business

Abstract

Online Interactive Platforms offer a variety of services including communication, information exchange, and connections that can create hundreds of thousands of interconnected users. Recent studies suggest that growth and sustainability of platfom users’ interconnectedness, that is, users' collective tendency to interconnectedness, are the two essential ingredients to succeed in such e-Businesses. This paper aims to explore the notion of “network correlation” in e-Business context in an attempt to provide managers of online interactive platforms with an analytical tool for monitoring growth and sustainability of users’ interconnectedness. We leverage Doktorsitesi.com as a digital trace data source and user metadata (role, gender) source to conduct both static and temporal network correlation analysis, and show that network correlations regarding the extent to which users are interconnected and network correlations regarding user metadata can help us to monitor and to suggest ways to quantitatively sustain growth of users’ interconnectedness. Taken together, our results suggest that network correlation analyses is capable of offering analytics to better describe, prescribe, and predict sustainable users’ interconnectedness on online interactive platforms. Accordinly, platform managers may consider the addition of a platform feature that helps newcomers with growing their interconnectedness based on the interconnectedness analytics.