Effects of Collective Goods on Virtual Community Activity

With the emergence of new communication technologies, virtual communities now became an important part of our lives. A virtual community is defined as a group of people with common interests and needs who interact with each other via computer network in cyberspace. In this research, we empirically investigated how collective goods affect the member satisfaction and activity of virtual communities. Collective goods are goods that cannot be produced individually but that can be produced as a group. Based on literature survey, we classified collective goods into 5 types: social network, communion, knowledge, experience, and transaction. All types of collective goods except transaction positively affected the satisfaction of virtual communities, while social network, knowledge, and experience positively affected the activity of virtual communities