An empirical investigation of knowledge withholding in virtual community

Virtual community has greatly enriched people's learning resources, stimulated their learning activities, and provided an online learning platform for people geographically-dispersed to communicate and collaborate. In the past decade, we have witnessed a growing research interest in virtual community, but most studies focused on why community members are willing to participate and contribute. It is necessary and important to notice that lurkers basically represent a large portion of users in most virtual communities, and therefore, a deep understanding of why people are unwilling to contribute, or withholding the knowledge they may provide will offer us some additional insights. In this study, we investigate the different types of psychological factors which are hypothesized to affect knowledge withholding in virtual community. Our study is also expected to initiate a new research angle to explore and understand users' passive behavior in virtual community, and provide some useful insights for both research and practice.