This study focuses on the self-organized cooperative consumption of platform participants on social media platform, and reveals how the brand owner cooperates with two-sided customers to achieve value co-creation.
The authors adopted a case study approach to explore how a Chinese beauty startup developed collaborative networks from 2013 to 2022, and tracked the the changes of network structure and cooperation mechanism.
The study finds that the brand owner cooperates with two-sided customers to integrate resources and establish diverse relational trust, which enhances the evolution of a heterogeneous collaborative network for value co-creation.
The study builds upon traditional dyadic actor-to-actor interactions between providers and customers, develops a novel interaction framework of actor-to-network to explain the value co-creation by collaborative networking, reveals the self-organized mechanism of cooperative consumption on social media.
