Who are influential in Q&A communities? A measure of V-Constraint based on knowledge diffusion capability

Recent years have witnessed a surge of research on the identification of key users in online communities. However, seldom research has focused on their knowledge diffusion capabilities. The purpose of this study is to propose a new measure to find key users who perform well in knowledge diffusion in order to promote users’ active participation in Q&A communities. In particular, this article develops an improved measure consolidating both users’ structural hole and knowledge diffusion capability and evaluates its performance through a field study involving 230,000 users and more than 132 million network relations of users. Our results show that our proposed measure can be used to detect key users who occupy structural holes’ advantages in social networks. In addition, key users detected by our proposed measure generally perform well on nearly all dimensions of knowledge diffusion capability compared with other measures of key users. Our study entails important theoretical and practical contributions.

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