EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON KNOWLEDGE SHARING FACTORS IN TRAVEL ONLINE COMMUNITY

As tourism and Internet economy mix together, more and more people acquire travel information through travel online community, and it has greatly promoted knowledge sharing in the community. Therefore, it is of great importance to research on this behavior. This paper, on the basis of existed literatures and in-depth interviews, took theory of social exchange and social cognition theory into consideration and chose users from 6 famous Chinese travel online communities as the respondents. An equation model was set up to analyze the influential factors and influence mechanism of knowledge sharing in travel online community. The results showed that opportunity cost has a negative impact on knowledge sharing wish while trust and reciprocity have positive impacts on it; and sharing wish has a positive impact on sharing behavior. In the end, this paper offered some suggestions for the management and operation of knowledge sharing in travel online community.