An Empirical Investigation of Message Pass-along Behavior Intention: From the Perspectives of Social Cognitive Theory and Social Capital Theory

• Main Authors: Kuei-ju Lin, 林桂如
• Other Authors: Lin Tung Ching
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/6g5q9j

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 資訊管理學系研究所 === 96 === With the common adoption of the Internet and Web in the recent years, the WOM has been changed to electronic WOM (e- WOM). E-WOM is the positive or negative statements made about a product, company, or media personality that are made widely available via the Internet. It has become an important source of information for the consumer to make decisions including purchase and more and more people have noticed the importance of its applications. The goal of this research is to investigate “message passing along behavior intention” (MPBI) by using Social Cognitive Theory and Social Capital Theory from the viewpoints of people and environment. We use survey method to collect the data and use PLS to analyze it. And the results reveal that when people passing message along to others, they care about how close these messages are with them instead of how correct these messages are. It implies that MPBI has the nature of daily life, and therefore, people will be more willing to pass daily life messages. Besides, individuals tend to pass along messages to people who have substantial relationship with him/her. We also found people pass message along to people not for reputation but for expressing their affections to others. In addition, message passing Self-efficacy is also important to MPBI. We also classified MPBI into two types — the one is hedonic and the other is utilitarian. The results indicate that people have different behavioral pattern when they deal with different kind of MPBI. In sum, MPBI is a channel for people to maintain the relationship with others and the findings of this study provides some suggestions for the e-WOM research.