Paper Type

Short

Paper Number

1632

Description

Online question-and-answer (Q&A) communities have been emerging as knowledge acquisition platforms. This study develops a heuristic-systematic model (HSM) to investigate the effects of systematic and heuristic cues on answer adoption behaviors, where the writing style in terms of narrative or non-narrative structure is proposed as a novel heuristic cue. It also firstly presents that recipient expertise will moderate the impact of systematic and heuristic cues differently. Preliminary experiments are conducted based on Q&A data collected from Zhihu.com. The results demonstrate that narrative answers significantly facilitate adoption behaviors, and viewer expertise negatively moderates this impact. The results also verify the positive impacts of other two selected systematic (answer completeness) and heuristic (answer helpfulness votes) cues, but the moderating effects of viewer expertise have not been well observed. This study contributes to enriching the interpretation mechanism of online Q&A adoption behaviors and provides practical insights for enhancing user engagement in online communities.

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Jul 2nd, 12:00 AM

Can Telling a Story Work? Understanding Answer Adoption Behavior in Online Q&A Communities from a Heuristic-Systematic Perspective

Online question-and-answer (Q&A) communities have been emerging as knowledge acquisition platforms. This study develops a heuristic-systematic model (HSM) to investigate the effects of systematic and heuristic cues on answer adoption behaviors, where the writing style in terms of narrative or non-narrative structure is proposed as a novel heuristic cue. It also firstly presents that recipient expertise will moderate the impact of systematic and heuristic cues differently. Preliminary experiments are conducted based on Q&A data collected from Zhihu.com. The results demonstrate that narrative answers significantly facilitate adoption behaviors, and viewer expertise negatively moderates this impact. The results also verify the positive impacts of other two selected systematic (answer completeness) and heuristic (answer helpfulness votes) cues, but the moderating effects of viewer expertise have not been well observed. This study contributes to enriching the interpretation mechanism of online Q&A adoption behaviors and provides practical insights for enhancing user engagement in online communities.

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