Understanding suppliers' participation in business-to-government (B2G) electronic auction markets in the thai context

This paper investigates online knowledge sharing behaviour in Baidu Knows, a platform sponsored by the largest search engine company Baidu in China. We developed a spider engine to collect data from over 2 million questions posted at Baidu Knows. The data collected allows us to profile registered members, to answer questions such as who are the main driving force of those online communities and their attributes, and who are the free-riders seldom posting and answering questions. We also test several hypotheses in explaining the motivations of knowledge sharing, and the quality of such knowledge sharing. Our results indicate that there is a large proportion of users who seldom answer questions, but always ask questions. Although their behaviour seems selfish at the surface, they are actually the key factors driving the growth of online knowledge sharing communities.