Ling Zhao

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Online product recommendation (OPR) provided by product recommender systems as well as consumers is a crucial service in social shopping communities (SSCs) for improving consumers’ shopping experience and fostering long-term relationships. However, little is understood about how these two sources of recommendations influence consumers' decision-mak...

Purpose As the social media platform becomes an ever more important communication channel between company and customer, companies are learning how they can best utilize social media to better communicate their brands with customers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the communication tactics adopted by the enterprise microblogs using a commu...

Purpose Mobile appstores have fast sprung up during the last few years. The large number of apps in these appstores results in increased search effort for the customer as well as fierce competition leading to poorer revenues for both appstores as well as developers. Therefore, appstores allow developers to resort to bundling apps so as to increase...

As a relatively new behavior, donation to content creators in social media has become very popular in the last few years. Different from traditional donation to nonprofit organization or victims, donation to content creators in social media has received little attention from academic researchers. On the basis of the socio-technical systems framewor...

Based upon the stressor-strain-outcome framework, this study proposes that perceived system feature overload, information overload, and social overload are stressors which induce strain, in terms of social network fatigue and dissatisfaction. Both of social network fatigue and dissatisfaction further influence discontinuous use intention. The empir...

This study examined factors influencing customer loyalty in a mobile communication service context. First, we conducted an exploratory study of 226 responses to identify important factors driving customers to retain or switch. On the basis of the findings from the exploratory study and push-pull-mooring (PPM) theory, we developed an integrated fram...

Social commerce, as a relatively new phenomenon, has attracted little research attention. This study aims to provide initial insights into the dynamics of customer participation in social commerce. Based on the stimulus-organism-response paradigm, this study develops a model to investigate the effects of technological features (perceived interactiv...

We investigate the mind-sets driving users' content creation behavior on social network sites (SNSs) and antecedents of these mind-sets. The results of our survey of 1242 Renren users in China indicated that affective and continuance commitments are the main drivers of users' content creation behaviors on SNSs, while normative commitment has little...

Virtual communities (VCs) are attracting more attention as they provide a platform for people to share experiences and knowledge, which may further impact their purchase decisions. From a social capital perspective, this study investigated factors that cultivate a VC member's sense of belonging and their effects on facilitating his participation in...

Users' continuance intention is vital to the future of micro-blogging service with rapid development and intensive competitions among its providers. This study examines how network externalities, in terms of perceived network size and perceived complementarity, enhance micro-blogging service users' perceived interactivity, and how such perception o...

Although location-based social network (LBSN) services have developed rapidly in recent years, the reasons why people disclose location-related information under this environment have not been adequately investigated. This study builds a privacy calculus model to investigate the factors that influence LBSN users' intention to disclose location-rela...

Understanding the antecedents and consequences of customer satisfaction in the mobile communications market is important. This study explores the effects of service quality and justice on customer satisfaction, which, in turn, affects continuance intention of mobile services. Service quality, justice and customer satisfaction were measured by multi...

From a self-determination theory perspective, this study tries to investigate how perceived autonomy support, perceived relatedness and competence affect high school students’ intrinsic motivations (enjoyment and curiosity) to use the Internet, and the related outcomes of the motivation. Surveys are distributed to seven junior and ten senior high s...

This research study utilized the framework of digital inequality proposed by DiMaggio and Hargittai (2001) to examine the relationships among the subdimensions of Internet inequality and their outcomes. We firstly investigated the relationships between constructs of technical apparatus, autonomy of use, availability of social support, variation of...

In China, major C2C websites are focusing on increasing their customer bases by converting members of their virtual communities (VCs) into C2C buyers and sellers. This phenomenon is called e-commerce based on social networks (ENS). The current research analyzes what factors affect trust building among VC members and how this trust influences the tr...

This research-in-process study aimed to explore the factors affecting users' satisfaction and continuance intention of micro-blogging service. Based upon summarization of the features of microblogging service and literature review on interactivity, we proposed the conceptual research model. This study proposed that user satisfaction toward micro-bl...

With the rapid development of mobile technology and users’ wide adoption of mobile phones, mobile services have been a huge success in China. Even though the literature on the adoption of mobile services is quite extensive, few studies focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty in China. This study investigated the impact of perceived customer valu...

Recent years, virtual communities (VCs) have gotten greater attention from researchers. In order to investigate how to build trust in such an environment (VC) and what influences this kind of trust would have on the consumers' behaviors, this study proposes a model combined trust building mechanisms and the consumer purchase decision-making process...