Abstract:

The rising of the payingforknowledge mode has promoted the reform of the traditional online Q&A service. More and more social Q&A platforms have launched the knowledge paid service. From the perspective of knowledge providers' own factors and using the social capital theory, this paper constructed a theoretical model of the factors affecting users' knowledge paying behavior, which has three dimensions including structural social capital, relational social capital and cognitive social capital of knowledge providers. By crawling data on the "live" column of Zhihu.com, the model was verified by the negative binomial panel regression method. The results showed that expert attributes, such as the number of followers, the number of published articles, the number of paid questions the expert answered, the number of times that answers are approved，whether the expert has a real name certification, as well as whether the expert mentions his/her area of expertise, all have positive effects on users' purchasing decision. Accordingly, this paper provides relevant countermeasures for knowledge providers to better accumulate their own social capital on the social Q&A platform and obtain more favors from paying users. Meanwhile, this study also puts forward feasible suggestions for social Q&A platforms to improve the knowledge payment model.

Key words: Social Q&A platform, Knowledge paying behavior, Impact factor, Social capital theory, Knowledge providers