The Impact of Social Network: Understand Consumer’s Collaborative Purchase Behavior

With the popularity of social networking, consumer often relies on social network when making purchase decisions. Despite the growing importance of social network in supporting online purchase behavior, there has been limited research focusing on the effect of social network on consumer collaborative purchase behavior. This paper proposes a framework for understanding consumer's collaborative purchase behavior within online social groups. It is one of the first studies to our knowledge that explore the combined effect of social network structure and content on consumer's collaborative purchase. In this study, we first extract and analyze adjacent matrix, which representing related social networks, from a large dataset. This is then combined with interaction-based content analysis to identify the structure of social network. After verifying the impact of network attributes and structure on consumer purchases, we conducted content analysis based on chat records and identified product-related interaction structures and content composition information based on the language action perspective. Finally, we combine content analysis with network topology analysis to construct a weighted social network and calculate the impact of these social networks on consumer purchasing behavior. Our research proposes a research framework to effectively collect, extract and analyze the structure and content of social networks.