Research on the Participation Motivations of Users in UGC Society Based on DDCM

Abstract

This study combines satisfaction, achievement motivation, and social identity theories to construct a dynamic discrete choice model (DDCM) to characterize user participation behavior on the Internet UGC platform. The main motivational factors of users participating in the UGC platform are analyzed and extracted, including enjoyment and entertainment motivation, identity motivation, community belonging motivation, and information acquisition motivation from psychological and social interaction. A two-stage estimation method constructs and solves a dynamic discrete choice model. Objective data from Epinions, an online review community, was used to investigate the motivation of users to participate in the UGC platform. The results show that users can gain enjoyment, entertainment, and information acquisition utility by publishing and reading articles in the Epinions community. When users are concerned and trusted by other users in the community, or when their published articles are recognized and praised, users will have a strong sense of identity. The more frequently a user contributes to the community, the more trust they have in other users, and the stronger their sense of community belonging. Finally, some suggestions for developing and managing the Internet UGC platform are put forward based on the estimation results of the model.