Why should i pay for the knowledge in social Q&A platforms?

Abstract

The development of online payment service enables the charging options for knowledge sharing, and morphs the social Q&A platforms into the knowledge exchange market. In the emerging trilateral payment-based social Q&A platforms, the asker needs to offer a certain amount of consulting fees to the answerer, and may also get monetary reward by the listeners’ accumulated micro-payments. Thus, the asker’s pay intention is one of the distinctive characteristics compared with the traditional Q&A model. This preliminary paper aims at exploring the influence factors that trigger askers’ pay intention, by integrating the social exchange theory and social capital theory into examining the emerging style of trilateral payment-based social Q&A platforms.