What Drives Trust in Online Paid Knowledge? The Role of Customer Value

Online paid knowledge(OPK) has become very popular since online knowledge platforms have been undergoing a tremendous transformation from providing online free knowledge to OPK. Trust is vital because knowledge is subjective and OPK requires consumers to invest money, time and effort. This study focuses on factors that drive consumers’ trust since OPK creates a new revenue source for both knowledge platforms and knowledge providers. Drawing on customer value theory, we propose that consumers’ perceptions of customer value influence trust. We examine six value relevant factors extracted from three dimensions of customer value: functional (knowledge quality and price utility), emotional (perceived enjoyment and anxiety relief), and social value (social knowledge-image expression and social relationship support). Survey data was analyzed and hypotheses were tested with structural equation modeling(SEM). The results indicate that functional, emotional, and social value contribute significantly to trust. The findings and implications are discussed. suggest some theoretical contributions. First, this study focuses on paid context while previous studies have paid more attention to knowledge seeking behaviors in free context and we focus on consumers’ trust. While prior studies have paid more attention to users’ knowledge contributing and knowledge seeking behaviors in free context, we focus on users’ knowledge seeking behavior in paid context. The findings suggest that value derived from OPK are important factors in trust. Second, the study is the first to apply customer value theory in OPK context when there is a lack of understanding on trust formation in paid content. Previous studies focused on social factors (Guo et al. 2017; Yan and to investigate why users share and seek knowledge in knowledge communities. When it comes to social commerce in knowledge communities, there is a lack of treating knowledge as commodities and the mechanism how to build consumers’ trust in OPK remains unclear. It’s suitable to research paid content from a customer value perspective (Wang et al. Therefore, this study apply customer value theory to focus on what value may attract consumers and lead them to believe that OPK can be worth investing time and effort. Third, the study extends customer value theory by adding anxiety relief as a type of emotional value. Previous studies have focused on generating positive feelings (e.g., enjoyment) (Wang et al. 2013), but overlooked the role of reducing negative feelings (e.g., anxiety). Our study explores anxiety relief as an aspect of emotional value, which eliminates negative feelings, extending customer value theory and expanding studies on social commerce in knowledge communities. Negative emotions (e.g., anxiety) would increase people’s desire to engage in problem solving and acquiring utilitarian products (Chen et al. 2016), and tension release significantly influences consumers’ behaviors (Zolkepli and Kamarulzaman The emergence of OPK offers consumers an opportunity to obtain more accurate, professional and unique knowledge to help them improve skills and solve problems, which help consumers relieve anxiety. Our results verified that anxiety relief influences consumers’ trust. Therefore, anxiety relief is a new aspect of emotional value to be considered in studies that use customer value theory. The