Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx

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Decision Support Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dss

From free to paid: Customer expertise and customer satisfaction on

knowledge payment platforms☆
Jin Zhanga, Jilong Zhanga, Mingyue Zhangb,*
a
School of Business, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
b
International Business School, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing 100089, China

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: In this study, we investigate what factors are influential to customer satisfaction of paid knowledge, especially
Knowledge payment among different customer segments, by integrating user activities on both free and paid platforms. Considering
Customer expertise the complexity of knowledge acquisition, we first propose a novel measurement of “customer expertise” based on
Customer satisfaction text mining, as a criterion for customer segmentation. Drawing upon the value-percept diversity theory, we then
Price
postulate a conceptual model proposing that customers with different expertise would react differently to the
Customer segmentation
price of knowledge and historical knowledge-consuming transactions, in terms of customer satisfaction. We test
the model empirically through the hierarchical OLS regression with data collected from Zhihu and Zhihu Live.
Distinguishing expert and novice customers, we have findings that (1) expert customers are less sensitive to
price; (2) historical price positively influences the satisfaction of novice customers, but negatively for expert
customers; (3) expert customers are less influenced by historical satisfaction, which have important implications
for market targeting and knowledge pricing strategy.

1. Introduction emphasizes the pre-purchase behavior of customers [1,3-5]. However,

Capitalizing on the popularity, some free knowledge sharing plat-
forms recently have attempted to charge their users for accessing some
elaborate knowledge [1], which has fractured users into two groups:
knowledge providers and knowledge customers. For example,
<ce:italic>Zhihu</ce:italic> which used to be a free question &
answer community, launched a pay-for-listening service, namely,
<ce:italic>Zhihu Live</ce:italic> soon after, through which users
can join live talks on specific topics given by experts for an entrance fee.
The knowledge monetization industry significantly encourages profes-
sionals to provide more domain knowledge and helps customers to get
high quality knowledge as a result [2]. By utilizing the benefit of large
number of accumulated users on free knowledge sharing platforms, the
knowledge payment mode has gained a big success with its estimated
economy scale over 30 billion CNY in 2017 [1].
The core of maintaining the prosperity of a knowledge payment
platform is to stimulate its members to spontaneously provide knowl-
edge with high quality and thus to guarantee high satisfaction of
knowledge customers, which remains neglected and obscure in existing
literature yet. Limited researches about knowledge payment platforms
mostly focus on maximizing the profit or sales of each Live, which
due to the intangibility and inaccessibility of information goods before
purchasing, customers have to take high perceived risk with limited
pre-purchase knowledge [6], which further affects customer satisfac-
tion. Therefore, besides the pre-purchase behavior, the post-purchasing
satisfaction of knowledge customers also plays an important role for
revealing valuable content and dedicated knowledge providers in
knowledge consumption. This leaves a gap in our understanding of
what factors influence customer satisfaction of knowledge consump-
tion. Knowledge is quite different from tangible goods in the following
ways: (1) knowledge quality is hard to guarantee without traditional
gate-keeping on the side of knowledge production; (2) As a result of (1),
knowledge quality can not be easily evaluated before consuming [7];
(3) the perception of knowledge quality is related to the backgrounds
and expertise levels of customers, and is considerably subjective [8].
These raise challenges when exploring the influential factors of cus-
tomer satisfaction of knowledge consumption.
Factors explored from paid knowledge payment platforms provide
basic clues for this research issue. Among the limited information on
knowledge payment platforms, the price of knowledge is usually re-
garded as a significant indicator of a buyer's cost [3,4], but rarely a
potential signal of knowledge quality [9]. Generally, customer

☆
The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71772177/71402186/71802024/71402187/71331007).
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: zhangjin@rmbs.ruc.edu.cn (J. Zhang), zhangjilong@ruc.edu.cn (J. Zhang), zhangmingyue@bfsu.edu.cn (M. Zhang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2019.113140
Received 19 March 2019; Received in revised form 18 August 2019; Accepted 18 August 2019
0167-9236/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Jin Zhang, Jilong Zhang and Mingyue Zhang, Decision Support Systems, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2019.113140
J. Zhang, et al.
satisfaction would be lower with higher price and lower quality from
the cost-benefit theory view [10]. Moreover, from a dynamic perspec-
tive, customers' past knowledge consumption behavior may also play a
role towards their current satisfaction since they tend to be “sticky” to
some internal reference points [11], such as historical prices and his-
torical satisfaction.
However, lacking customer depiction, those factors seem in-
sufficient to explain the individual difference in satisfaction, which
requires comprehensive customer profiles with rich data. To cope with
that, we explored the data from a free knowledge sharing platform
(Zhihu) and a paid knowledge payment platform (Zhihu Live) in this
study, which share the same user base from free to paid. Those data on
free knowledge platforms imply the interest and expertise of each
customer, which contribute to explaining individual heterogeneity in
perceived quality of purchased knowledge and thus customer satisfac-
tion. Accordingly, this motivates our research questions: On knowledge
payment platforms, how knowledge price and customer historical
consumption behavior influence customer satisfaction about the paid
knowledge? Do such influences differ among customers with different
levels of knowledge expertise? How to objectively measure customer
expertise towards specific knowledge?
Our study focuses on the role of expertise in customer satisfaction
on knowledge payment platforms, aiming to answer the above research
questions. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work has been de-
voted to this specific research topic. Therefore, we propose a text-
mining method to measure customer expertise towards specific
knowledge by utilizing the switching process of customers from free to
paid knowledge platforms. Secondly, we build three hypotheses about
customer satisfaction, moderated by customer expertise. The model is
then empirically tested using the hierarchical OLS regression with data
of Zhihu and Zhihu Live. Our findings reveal that (1) customers with
higher level knowledge expertise are less sensitive to price; (2) histor-
ical price has positive influence on satisfaction of novice customers, but
negative influence on satisfaction of expert customers; (3) customers
with higher level knowledge expertise are less influenced by historical
satisfaction.
2. Literature review
2.1. Online knowledge sharing
Online knowledge sharing refers to the voluntary behavior of
sharing knowledge for free on knowledge sharing platforms. Existing
studies can be broadly divided into two streams: behavioral research
and recommendation research. In behavioral research, scholars majorly
focused on the motivation and the influencing factors of knowledge
sharing behavior [12], including individual cognition [13,14], inter-
personal interaction [15,16], and organizational context [17]. Specifi-
cally, from the perspective of social exchange, researchers [12,14] ex-
plained what motivated individuals to share. Other studies discussed
the role of environment based on social capital theory [15,18] and
organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) [17]. However, these studies
paid little attention to the knowledge content itself, let alone the dif-
ference between knowledge content and its impact on customer beha-
vior. The recommendation research can be categorized as answer re-
trieval and expert recommendation, where researchers conducted text
mining to extract semantic information lurking in questions or answers.
Answer retrieval is to achieve related answers to a given question [19],
while expert recommendation aims to suggest potential responders
based on semantic association between responders and questions [20].
2.2. Online knowledge consumption
Online knowledge consumption can be driven by either knowledge
providers (expert users) or knowledge customers (general users). For
the provider-driven mode, expert users design knowledge product/
2
Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx
service themselves, such as lectures and tutorials, for one-to-many
promotion. For the customer-driven mode, customers raise questions
with rewards, and then invite professionals or celebrities to give one-to-
one consultation. Most of existing literature focuses on the provider-
driven mode [1-3,5,21], in which this study can be also positioned.
In the provider-driven mode, some studies focused on revenue
maximization for a single provider or knowledge product, considering
sales [1], customers' willingness-to-pay (WTP) [5] and payment deci-
sion [4]. Some other researchers investigated the influence of trust [21]
or monetary incentive [2] on free knowledge contribution. However,
none of these studies put effort on customer satisfaction to paid
knowledge, which was found to further affect repeat sales, word of
mouth, customer loyalty, and overall firm performance in other do-
mains [22]. Customer satisfaction reflects the perceived knowledge
benefit gained by customers on knowledge payment platforms, which
further promotes repurchase and encourages high-qualified knowledge
products from providers. Thus, the gap of customer satisfaction of on-
line knowledge consumption highly motivates our study to explore its
influencing factors for different customer segments.
2.3. Customer expertise
Customer expertise can be defined as the ability of customers to
perform product/service-related tasks successfully and their under-
standing of knowledge about various attributes in a product/service
category [8]. Expertise was generally discussed in technical or highly-
customized service, such as finance [23], DIY retailing [8] and legal
service [24]. The impact of customer expertise on perceived technical/
functional service quality has been explored [23], which further influ-
ences trust [23], loyalty [8] and satisfaction [8,24]. Similar to studies
on customer expertise, other studies on online shopping revealed the
moderate effect of customer product knowledge on satisfaction [25]
and purchase decision-making process [26]. However, the influence of
customer expertise in knowledge consumption scenario has rarely been
studied. For the measurement of customer expertise, most behavioral
studies mainly depended on survey data (self-reported expertise [8,24],
or several simple questions [23,26]). Instead, we measured it through
text mining based on the historical knowledge activities of each user in
this study. Such measurement is inspired by expert finding studies in
knowledge management [27,28]. The task of finding experts is defined
as follows: given a collection of crawled documents, a list of expert
candidates and a set of topics, find the experts for each of these topics.
The most popular approach for expert finding is called the candidate-
based approach which estimates the expertise scores by textual simi-
larities between the topics and candidates' profiles. For instance, Balog
et al. [27] first created a textual representation of the individuals'
knowledge according to the documents with which they were asso-
ciated, and then defined expertise as its similarity with the textual re-
presentation of the given topic. Ha-Thuc et al. [28] computed the ex-
pertise score for a (member, skill) pair (m, s) using the inner product of
the latent factor vectors sms = xmT ys , where xm represents the member
and ys represents the skill. And they finally got a vector representing the
expertise scores for different skills ( x mT ys1, x mT ys2 , …, x mT ysn ).
3. Hypothesis development
The research model is proposed as Fig. 1. The customer expertise is
extracted from free knowledge sharing platforms and then applied to
knowledge payment platforms. The current price, historical price and
historical satisfaction are collected from transactions on knowledge
payment platforms. The hypothesis development in Fig. 1 is elaborated
as follows.
3.1. Customer expertise
Knowledge is a special case of service with its own unique
J. Zhang, et al. Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx

3.3. Historical price

Historical price represents the deal prices of previous transactions.

According to the view of Helson's adaptation level theory, individual
would possess a corresponding average adaptation level based on sti-
muli in prior experience [32]. Therefore, historical price, as an explicit
stimulus, would form the adaptation level and serve as a foundation
when estimating further stimuli. Several researchers have also sug-
gested some form of past prices as an appropriate price standard, such
as Mayhew and Winer [33], Kalwani et al. [34] and Lichtenstein and
Bearden [35]. This indicates that historical price would serve as re-
ference price [36], which can be defined as “an internal standard
against which observed prices are compared” [37]. In this regard,
Fig. 1. Conceptual model of the moderate effect of expertise. customers would compare the historical price of similar knowledge to
the current encounter, which further influences their purchase
choices [38]. Apparently, higher historical price leads to the perception
characteristics. The intangibility and non-standardization of service
of relatively lower current price since price perception is rather relative
lead to the uncertainty in customer satisfaction [29], which is further
than absolute [39]. This further improves satisfaction because of lower
amplified by the nature of “knowledge”. For general service, such as
perceived cost, in line with the cost-benefit theory.
delivery service, there are relatively predictable outcomes and clear
Given that historical price has a positive impact on customer sa-
rules to evaluate, while knowledge seems more difficult to evaluate. For
tisfaction through the formation of reference price, the magnitude of its
paid knowledge, the variance of perceived quality is attributed to cus-
impact may be moderated by the customer's expertise to the specific
tomer expertise, such that individual heterogeneity in expertise may
knowledge. Prior literature has found that there are distinguishing
form different performance assessments [24,30]. For example, common
features of expert decision making [40]. Experts are more able to select
folks are always confused with impressionist paintings by Vincent van
information on the grounds of its relevance to the task at hand [41] and
Gogh, which is regarded as treasure by artists, owing to the varying
show a much stronger preference for effectual logic in decision making.
perceived quality.
Novices, on the other hand, use less complex decision rules and eval-
The learning effectiveness of paid knowledge is also largely di-
uate problems more on the “perceptual level” of the input informa-
vergent with different expertise levels for the same knowledge. On
tion [40]. Regarding product evaluation task, expert customers with a
knowledge payment platforms, online learners are easier to get con-
great deal of product knowledge are able to reliably estimate the value
fused due to the lack of face-to-face interaction. The expertise reflects
of an item on the basis of its features [42]. Novice customers are likely
previous knowledge accumulation on certain field, which leads to
to use extrinsic cues, such as price or brand name, to a greater extent
better understanding of similar knowledge. Therefore, expert customers
than experts, due to their inability to analyze intrinsic cues [43]. This
tend to acquire more knowledge with better understanding of knowl-
suggests that the environmental factors including price and historical
edge attributes. In this study, customer expertise can be extracted from
prices may have different influences on expert and novice customers.
free knowledge sharing platforms since there is much more abundant
More specifically, Biswas and Sherrell [43] examined the impact of
behavior information about customers' knowledge interest and demand.
reference prices on customers' final judgment and found that product
knowledge played an important role. Customers having familiarity and
knowledge of the product category are not likely to use reference prices
3.2. Current price
to shift their product evaluation [44,45]. In our context, customers with
high expertise of the paid knowledge are capable assessing the value or
Existing literature has revealed both positive [9] and negative roles
worth of a particular knowledge on the basis of its content, thus the
of price [1,4,5] for online knowledge consumption. According to the
reference price formed by historical prices would has less impact.
cost-benefit theory [31], a rational individual will perform a certain
Hence, we hypothesize:
activity only if the marginal benefits from doing so outweigh the
H2a. On online knowledge payment platform, historical price will
marginal costs [10]. Intuitively, price is regarded as the economic cost
beless positively (or even negatively) influential on customer
for customers to access the knowledge [1]. With the same benefit but
satisfaction for individuals withhigher level knowledge expertise,
more cost, customer satisfaction will decrease [10]. Therefore, current
compared to those with lower level expertise.
price is negatively associated with the customer satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the theory of the value-percept diversity model predicts
that satisfaction is a response to a cognitive-evaluative process [10]. It
3.4. Historical satisfaction
indicates that the value perception is based on mapping the price with
individuals' subjective perception of quality. When the price of service/
Koufteros et al. [46] distinguished the current transaction-specific
product remains the same but the perceived quality increases, custo-
encounter satisfaction and historical satisfaction and studied their re-
mers will feel more satisfied. For the same knowledge, novice customers
lationships. Particularly, historical satisfaction is an evaluation of cu-
may fail to realize or understand the sophisticated knowledge due to
mulative or summary satisfaction relating to all transactions prior to the
limited quality perception [24], while expert customers can gain ad-
current one, which better predicts customers' intentions and behavior
ditional fulfillment, which offsets the corresponding cost to some ex-
[22,47]. Scholars have long recognized the cumulative effect of long-
tent. Therefore, we argue the moderate role of expertise in the negative
term experiences with the product/service on customer judgment [48].
relationship between current price and customer satisfaction, with the
For example, customers with positive previous experiences tend to be
hypothesis:
more forgiving and tolerant [49]. The current encounter satisfaction is
H1. On online knowledge payment platforms, current price will be less
derived not only from the current experience, but also from historical
negatively influential on customer satisfaction for individuals with
satisfaction since all human interactions or evaluations develop and
higher level knowledge expertise, compared to those with lower
accumulate over time [47]. This is consistent with the adaptation
level expertise.
theory [32] that historical satisfaction is viewed as the adaptation an-
chor for the consumer's evaluations of the current encounter. Hence,

3
J. Zhang, et al.
previous studies argue that historical satisfaction has main positive
effects as an antecedent to encounter satisfaction by modeling it in an
adaptation theory framework [46].
Consider next the moderating effects of expertise, in other words,
whether customers' expertise to the specific knowledge interacts with
historical satisfaction to determine the encounter satisfaction. As
mentioned above, experts and novices have distinguishing features
when making decisions, including product evaluation tasks [40,42].
Compared to novice customers, expert ones are sensitive to the current
quality of knowledge, which leads to fair judgment based on the present
experience. Novice customers with limited ability to distinguish
knowledge quality are more affected by stereotype [40]. Therefore, we
hypothesize:
H2b. On online knowledge payment platform, historical satisfaction
will beless positively influential on customer satisfaction for
individuals withhigher level knowledge expertise, compared to
those with lower level expertise.
4. Research context
The research was conducted on Zhihu with a free knowledge sharing
service Zhihu and a paid knowledge service Zhihu Live. In Zhihu Live,
there are two distinguishing roles, namely, speaker (knowledge pro-
vider) and customer (knowledge consumer). Speakers are encouraged
to launch lectures (Lives) through multiple media like texts, images,
video and audio. To access these Lives, customers should pay certain
entrance fees, and then are able to leave comments with scores (1 to 5
stars), which are regarded as an explicit indicator of customer sa-
tisfaction. The vast majority of speakers and customers are also active
on the free knowledge sharing platform (Zhihu), where they can publish
original articles and answers to share knowledge or vote up others'
articles. All the textual information can well reflect the knowledge
domain or interest of certain users.
5. Research method
5.1. Data collection
As of July 2018, there had been 4010 Lives from 1756 speakers on
Zhihu Live. We obtained the complete Live list, containing more than
270,000 customers and over 500,000 reviews. From this list, we man-
aged to find a representative sample of customers through the system
sampling method on reviews, i.e., choosing the first review in every 10
reviews. Then, the corresponding reviewers were extracted as the raw
customer sample consisted of 41,071 members.
To reduce the bias from infrequent customers, we focused on fre-
quent customers who had reviewed over 5 Lives. With rich experience,
these customers were more likely to provide reasonable scores. Finally,
the dataset consisted of 8538 frequent customers. We collected their
complete activity history between their first day on the site (when they
registered) and July 2018 from both free and paid platforms.
Consequently, 100,780 reviews on 3911 Lives on Zhihu Live were re-
served. We also collected the speakers' activity history of those lives on
Zhihu (1687 speakers). Table 1 summarizes the data collection.
Table 1
Summary of the dataset.
User base #Speaker #Customer
1687 8538
Paid platform #Live #Review
3911 100,780
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Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx
5.2. Customer expertise
On knowledge payment platforms, customer expertise means how
expert a customer is with the knowledge (Live) s/he pays. It has been
indicated that expertise crucially depends on the topic [27,28], which
means that “expertise” towards different knowledge can be different for
the same customer. Thus, for the measurement of customer expertise, we
draw on the ideas of previous studies [27,28] measuring expertise with
the similarity between a person and content/skill, to define expertise
for each customer-Live pair by text mining. However, the knowledge in
Live is far less explicit: (1) the title or description of Live is too short to
provide sufficient information; (2) the content of Live involving audio,
video, pictures and slides, is complex to model jointly and not available
before the start of Live. Thus, to overcome the problems above, an al-
ternative method is used in this study to represent the knowledge of
Live with the knowledge distribution of its speaker. For most speakers,
it is very common that what they talk in Live is related to those they
share on free platforms. For example, an influencer of IT on free plat-
forms would probably provide Live about IT to his/her followers, rather
than Lives about fashion or film. Given the same speaker, we assume
the high correlation between a speaker's free knowledge distribution
and the knowledge in Live. Based on this assumption, we could measure
expertise with the similarity between a customer-speaker free knowl-
edge distribution pair instead of a customer-Live pair. Although rea-
sonable in most cases, it should be clearly pointed out that such as-
sumption might raise potential issues for speakers disseminating little
knowledge on free platforms or totally different knowledge in Live on
paid platforms. In such case, the correlation between a speaker's free
knowledge distribution and the knowledge in Live will become weak,
which could be seen as the limitations of this study.
In this study, we calculated customer-Live expertise with the simi-
larity of the knowledge distributions of the customer and the speaker
generated by doc2vec model. Concretely, for each user, we firstly col-
lected all the answers and articles s/he created or voted up, and then
joined them end to end as the user's characteristic document, as shown
in Fig. 2.
Then, we applied the doc2vec model to generate a vector of each
user, visualized in Fig. 3. Doc2vec is an effective Neural Network-based
unsupervised learning algorithm to learn vector representations for
variable-length pieces of texts [50]. Doc2vec can be seen as an im-
proved version of word2vec [51]. In word2vec, words are mapped into
a numerical high-dimensional vector space by fully incorporating con-
textual and semantic information. Similar to word2vec, doc2vec could
also transfer texts into high-dimensional vectors, which achieved out-
standing performance on text processing tasks [50]. Specifically, there
were 10,208 characteristic documents from 10,208 users (1687
speakers and 8538 frequent customers) in the dataset. As a result, a
10,208 × 200 matrix was generated as the knowledge distribution
matrix where 10,208 refers to the number of users and 200 refers to the
dimension in doc2vec model.
Finally, the expertise of customer (Ci) towards a Live by speaker (Sj)
was measured as the similarity of knowledge distribution (KD) between
Ci and Sj, which equals the cosine metric between KDCi and KD Sj as Eq.
(1).
KDCi KD Sj
ExpertiseCi, Sj = *
KDCi 2 KD Sj 2 (1)
#Create answer #Vote up answer
157,416 3,519,540
Free platform
#Create article #Vote up article
11,435 439,898
J. Zhang, et al.
Fig. 2. Example of generating characteristic document for a user.
where Ci and Sj denote the i-th customer and j-th speaker, and KD is the
vector representing a user's knowledge distribution trained by doc2vec
model.
The distinctiveness and advantage of the proposed expertise mea-
surement is to mitigate the “cold start” problem in the knowledge
payment platform by linking the customer's activities from free to paid
platforms. Generally, the knowledge payment platform is evolved from
the free knowledge sharing platform by capitalizing the popularity, and
customer won’t make a purchase until they have fully experienced the
free content. Hence, as a beginner customer for the paid platform (e.g.,
Zhihu Live), s/he has probably accumulated some activities such as
reading or commenting on the free platform (e.g., Zhihu). We learn his/
her knowledge distribution from those activities in free platform with
doc2vec model. Then an expertise score can be calculated as the simi-
larity of knowledge distribution between the customer and the knowl-
edge provider.
We conducted a user study to demonstrate the rationality of the
measurement. We firstly chose three different topics, namely web front-
end development, anime and musical composition, from Zhihu Live
platform. Taking anime for example, we selected 10 most-rated Lives.
For each Live, we ranked all its customers with their expertise, choosing
the top 10% customers as the high-expertise segment (H) and bottom
10% as the low-expertise segment (L). We then invited 3 raters who
were expert in anime according to their self-reports to rate the “ex-
pertise” of customers in both H and L segments. We expected that the
“expertise” levels for H segment reported by the raters would be sig-
nificantly higher than those for L segment. If so, it could be concluded
that the proposed measurement performed effective to distinguish dif-
ferent expertise levels. Concretely, since all the contents that the cus-
tomer created or voted up were displayed in his/her homepage, we then
asked the 3 raters to browse the homepage of each customer in both H
and L segments. All the homepages were randomly assigned to each
rater. After spending sufficient time reading the homepage, the 3 raters
were asked to provide answers to the following questions on a seven-
point Likert scale.
Suppose that the customer purchased a Live about anime (Insert Live
name here). (Q1) Is the customer able to understand the knowledge in the
Live? (Q2) Is the customer able to evaluate the qualification of the Live?
(Q3) How much is the expertise of the customer on anime?
The result of the user study is shown in Table 2. Taking anime for
example, there are 18 customers in segment H and 19 customers in
segment L.(Some customers closed their accounts, which leads to mis-
match in sizes between segments H and L.) High-expertise customers
are believed to be able to understand (4.93 > 3.33, t = 3.1356) and
evaluate (4.93 > 3.32, t = 3.2199) the Live better than low-expertise
5
Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx
customers, and are believed as more expert (4.24 > 2.58, t = 3.0952)
in the domain of anime. Therefore, the proposed measurement consists
with human's evaluation of expertise. Similarly, the results of the other
two topics (i.e., web front-end development and musical composition)
also show similar conclusions, supporting the rationality of the pro-
posed measurement.
5.3. Main variable and summary statistics
5.3.1. Dependent variable
This study mainly explores the influential factors of customer sa-
tisfaction on knowledge consumption for customers with different de-
grees of expertise. In Zhihu Live, customers can rate the Lives after their
participation, along with review texts. Numerical ratings on goods and
services are deemed to well reflect the customer's overall satisfaction
[52,53]. Therefore, numerical ratings were used to measure the in-
dividual satisfaction of each customer.
5.3.2. Independent variable and control variable
The independent variables include customer expertise, current Live
price, customer historical price and historical satisfaction.
5.3.2.1. Customer expertise. To acquire a relative rather than absolute
value, these expertise scores were further normalized in the final
dataset. To eliminate the potential influence of outliers, all the
standardized scores larger than 3 were set to 3, and scores lower than
−3 were set to −3. Therefore, we finally got a standardized expertise
score in [−3, 3] for each customer-Live pair.
5.3.2.2. Current Live price. Current price is directly displayed to
customers in every Live page. The distribution of prices of all the
3911 Lives is shown in Table 3. The prices of over 90% Lives are
between CNY 5 to CNY 40, and more than 99% Lives are between CNY
5 and CNY 100.
5.3.2.3. Historical price. Since the perception of the current Live price is
rather relative than absolute [39], for frequent customers on Zhihu Live,
they would unavoidably compare the current Live with other Lives s/he
has participated. Therefore, for every customer, we calculated the
average price of all the Lives s/he had reviewed, as the reference price
of the customer, denoted as H_price.
5.3.2.4. Historical satisfaction. To measure the historical satisfaction,
we collected all the evaluation ratings provided by each customer in
previous transactions. Considering the consistency among each rating,
Fig. 3. Knowledge distribution matrix.
J. Zhang, et al. Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx

Table 2
Results of t-test between high-expertise and low-expertise groups.
Sample size Mean (S.D.)
Domain H L Question H L Difference t-Value p-Value

Web Q1 3.88 (1.08) 2.67 (1.06) 1.21*** 6.3732 3.30E−09

front-end 63 63 Q2 3.82 (1.06) 2.68 (1.05) 1.14*** 6.0714 1.43E−08
development Q3 3.66 (1.16) 2.56 (1.05) 1.11*** 5.6078 1.27E−07
Q1 4.93 (1.79) 3.33 (1.27) 1.59** 3.1356 3.47E−03
Anime 18 19 Q2 4.93 (1.78) 3.32 (1.23) 1.61** 3.2199 2.77E−03
Q3 4.24 (1.97) 2.58 (1.24) 1.66** 3.0952 3.86E−03
Q1 4.47 (1.41) 3.32 (0.93) 1.15** 3.2064 2.57E−03
Musical composition 22 22 Q2 4.29 (1.51) 3.11 (0.88) 1.18** 3.1826 2.75E−03
Q3 3.73 (1.62) 2.24 (0.71) 1.48*** 3.9364 3.05E−04

Note. The number of customers varies with Live, which leads to the difference of sample size among different domains.

all the ratings given by the same customer would fluctuate around his/
her rating baseline. Therefore, we measured the historical satisfaction
by the average rating of all the Lives reviewed by every customer,
denoted as H_sat.
We also included some control variables about Live and its speaker.
We collected 100,780 observations from 8538 customers on 3911 Lives.
Table 4 summarizes the descriptive statistics of the main variables as
well as the control variables.
5.4. Model specification
We used the hierarchical OLS regression analysis to test our hy-
potheses. For better interpretability, all the variables were scaled to z-
standardized values (z (x ) = (x x¯)/ sd (x ) ). In Model 1, we only con-
sidered control variables. In Model 2, we tested the main effects of
independent variables, current price, historical price, historical sa-
tisfaction, and customer expertise. As the primary focus of this study,
we further tested the interaction terms of expertise and other three
variables in Model 3 as follows:
Ratingi, j= a 0 + a1*Expertise + a2*Current _price + a3*H _price + a4
*H _sat
+ a5*Current _price*Expertise + a6*H _price *Expertise
+ a7 *H _sat *Expertise + BT *Control + i, j
(2)
where a0 to a7 and B are the parameters to be estimated, Control denotes
the vectors of all control variables and ϵi,j is the error term. The variable
expertise has already been z-standardized to [−3, 3].
6. Results and discussion
6.1. The influential factors of customer satisfaction on knowledge
consumption
coefficients of control variables, indicating the importance of Live
quality and speaker's experience in influencing the customer satisfac-
tion. However, due to the complexity of paid knowledge satisfaction,
these factors explain the variation marginally, with a baseline adjusted
R2 of 0.01479. After adding the independent variables in Model 2, the
adjusted R2 increases significantly to 0.3534 (F(14,100765) = 3936,
p < 0.001), which supports the direct influence of current price, his-
torical price, historical satisfaction and customer expertise. Specifically,
the customer expertise has a positive effect on satisfaction
(β = 1.32E−02, p < 0.001). Customers expert in the purchased
knowledge tend to achieve higher satisfaction. Besides, the regression
coefficient for the current Live price was negative and significant
(β = −3.34E−02, p < 0.001), indicating that higher price reduces the
customer surplus thus decreasing satisfaction. Specifically, other things
being equal, one unit increase of the Live price (1 CNY) will result in
1.14E−03 decrease of the individual rating by transforming the z-score
to original prices. Moreover, historical price has a positive impact on
customer satisfaction (β = 9.81E−03, p < 0.001), serving as the evi-
dence that customers tend to treat historical purchasing price as a re-
ference price. Thus, they perceive the current Live price differently and
lead to different levels of satisfaction. Furthermore, historical satisfac-
tion would be positively related to customer satisfaction. The regression
coefficient is significant (β = 5.83E−01, p < 0.001). Customers who
are more content with previous experience are more tolerant and easier
to satisfy. By transforming the z-score to its original value, 1 score in-
crease of the historical average rating would lead to 0.993 higher scores
for the current Live.
In Model 3, we further added the interaction terms to the model,
which achieved an improved adjusted R2 of 0.3538 (F
(17,100762) = 3247, p < 0.001). The magnitude of coefficients for the
above main effects do not change much, indicating that the main effects
are robust under different model specifications.
Notably, we actually care more about the interacting effect of ex-
pertise with the other three main independent variables, which will be
discussed later.

Table 5 presents the results of the analysis for main effects and in-
teraction terms. The dependent variable is the customer's individual
rating, which represents his/her satisfaction for the current Live.
Through VIF (Variance inflation factor) tests, there are no multi-
collinearity problems (2.977 for Model 1, 2.982 for Model 2, 2.982 for
Model 3).
According to Table 5, Model 1 provides significant results, F
(10,100769) = 151.3, p < 0.001. Model 1 shows significant
6.2. The role of expertise
Investigating the interaction effects, we find significant moderate
role of expertise. H1 predicts a significant interaction between customer
expertise and the current Live price in relation to the satisfaction with
the Live. Specifically, the negative influence of current Live price would
be smaller for customers with higher expertise, since they perceive the

Table 3
Price distribution.
Price (CNY) [0,5) [5,10) [10,20) [20,30) [30,40) [40,100) [100,∞) Total

Live Count 12 1554 1313 455 229 332 16 3911

Percentage (%) 0.31% 39.73% 33.57% 11.63% 5.86% 8.49% 0.41% 100.00%

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J. Zhang, et al. Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx

Table 4
Description of main variables.
Variable type Variable Description Mean S.D. Min Max

Dependent variable Ratingi,j Numerical rating of Livej given by Customeri 4.598 0.773 1.000 5.000

CurrentPricej Price of the Livej 23.700 22.629 0.000 598.000

Independent H_pricei Average price of Lives rated by Customeri 2.369 1.020 0.332 20.334
variable H_sati Average scores rated by Customeri 4.598 0.454 1.000 5.000
CustomerExpertisei,j Similarity of knowledge distribution between Customeri and the Speakerj 0.076 0.153 −0.434 1.000

Durationj Audio duration of Livej (in minute) 84.140 40.412 0.000 357.090
N_Q&Aj Number of Q&A in Livej 33.350 35.096 0.000 374.000
N_Filej Number of files shared in Livej 20.520 24.794 0.000 328.000
N_AudioMessagej Number of audio messages in Livej 93.390 52.690 0.000 625.000
Control N_Livej Number of Lives launched by Speakerj 6.117 5.202 1.000 27.000
variable N_Answerj Number of answers published by Speakerj 251.900 449.072 0.000 4687.000
N_Articlej Number of articles published by Speakerj 60.730 142.990 0.000 1562.000
N_Followerj Number of followers of Speakerj 98,255.000 187,982.300 15.000 1,723,807.000
N_Followeej Number of followees of Speakerj 292.200 523.865 1.000 6066.000
N_Topicj Number of topics followed by Speakerj 50.660 75.726 1.000 767.000

Note. The number of Lives is 3911, the number of customers is 8538 and the number of observations (ratings) is 100,780. Speakerj means the speaker of Live j.

Live quality better. The interaction effect is found to be statistically
significant (t = 3.927) in Model 3 of Table 5, thus supporting H1. Since
expertise is a continuous variable, it's hard to explain the coefficients for
the interaction term directly (i.e., β = 1.21E−02, p < 0.001). We fur-
ther clarify the overall influence of current price with different levels of
expertise, that is, expertise = −3, −2, −1, 0, 1, 2, 3. It is worth noting
that expertise has been standardized and the value of 3 means three
standard deviation away from the mean value. The results are displayed
in line 2 of Table 6. Concretely, the negative influence of current Live
price is reduced with the increase of expertise, which rises from −0.070
(expertise = −3) to 0.003 (expertise = 3). When expertise level is 3,
the influence of current Live price can be even slightly positive (0.003).
The gradual change of coefficients has also been visualized in Fig. 4 (a),
where high level of expertise (H) refers to expertise = 3, middle (M)
refers to expertise = 0, and low (L) refers to expertise = −3. Although
novice customers are extensively influenced by current price, the pre-
cise perception of current quality keeps expert customers away from
price influence.
In line with H2a, there is a significant interaction effect between
expertise and historical price, which can be found in Model 3 of Table 5
(β = −6.95E−03, p < 0.01). Considering the positive main effect of
historical price, it supports that the positive influence of historical price
is decreased with the increase of expertise, which decreases from 0.032
(expertise = −3) to −0.01 (expertise = 3). These changes can be
found in line 3 of Table 6 and Fig. 4 (b), which agree with the H2a. For
customers with lower expertise, they only adapt to high price, leading
to a relative lower price perception and higher satisfaction. However, as
the expertise increases, customers also adapt to high quality, which
raises higher expectation of current transaction and reduces satisfac-
tion. Similarly, the OLS regression results in Table 5 also support the
interaction effect between expertise and historical satisfaction
(β = −1.73E−02, p < 0.001), which supports H2b. As shown in line 4
in Table 6 and Fig. 4, the positive influence of historical satisfaction is
reduced with the increase of expertise. In Fig. 4 (c), the slope of the line
for novice customers (slope = 0.634 when expertise = −3) is steeper
than the line for novice customers (slope = 0.531 when expertise = 3),
indicating that historical satisfaction has a greater impact on novice
customers than on expert customers in terms of the satisfaction to the
current Live.

Table 5
Parameter estimation.
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

Independent variable
Constant 8.56E−15 (0) 6.19E−05 (0.024) 1.10E−03 (0.43)
Expertise 1.32E−02*** (5.023) 1.45E−02*** (5.512)
Current_Price −3.34E−02*** (−11.689) −3.34E−02*** (−11.677)
H_price 9.81E−03*** (3.372) 1.07E−02*** (3.64)
H_sat 5.83E−01*** (228.906) 5.83E−01*** (228.448)
Current_Price × Expertise 1.21E−02*** (3.927)
H_price × Expertise −6.95E−03* (−2.572)
H_sat × Expertise −1.73E−02*** (−6.605)
Control variable
Duration 6.89E−02*** (16.171) 6.37E−02*** (18.435) 6.34E−02*** (18.339)
N_Q&A −4.66E−02*** (−10.095) −7.59E−03* (−2.025) −7.60E−03* (−2.028)
N_File 2.11E−02*** (5.672) 1.61E−02*** (5.349) 1.63E−02*** (5.421)
N_AudioMessage 5.18E−02*** (9.594) 1.53E−02*** (3.497) 1.55E−02*** (3.553)
N_Live 7.55E−02*** (23.223) 4.13E−02*** (15.37) 4.18E−02*** (15.553)
N_Answer 1.12E−02** (2.97) 4.10E−03 (1.34) 4.30E−03 (1.406)
N_Article −3.03E−02*** (−8.197) −1.85E−02*** (−6.161) −1.91E−02*** (−6.359)
N_Follower 1.78E−02*** (4.736) 3.61E−02*** (11.793) 3.59E−02*** (11.721)
N_Followee 7.63E−03* (2.331) −1.46E−03 (−0.541) 2.30E−04 (0.081)
N_Topic −1.89E−02*** (−5.908) −1.20E−02*** (−4.615) −1.24E−02*** (−4.779)
Adjusted R2 0.0147 0.3534 0.3538

All the variables are standardized to Z scores; t statistics in parentheses.

⋅ p < 0.1; * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001.

7
J. Zhang, et al. Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx

Table 6
Overall influence of three factors with different levels of expertise.
Expertise −3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3

Current_price −0.070 −0.058 −0.046 −0.033 −0.021 −0.009 0.003

H_price 0.032 0.025 0.018 0.011 0.004 −0.003 −0.010
H_sat 0.634 0.617 0.600 0.583 0.565 0.548 0.531

Fig. 4. Overall influence of three factors with different levels of expertise.

6.3. Robustness check
To validate our results, we conducted further experiments with
different parameter settings of the text-mining method, alternative
measurement of expertise and different text representation methods.
6.3.1. Dimension of doc2vec model
A potential caveat regarding our model estimation is that the ex-
pertise is calculated as the cosine of two doc2vec characteristic vectors
with a given dimension level (i.e., 200). However, the dimension of
doc2vec may have an impact on the measurement. To dispel the worry,
we also tested other settings of dimension, including 10, 50 and 100.
Table 7 shows the correlation matrix of these expertise values where
doc2vec10 means doc2vec model with 10 dimensions. According to
Table 7, expertise values calculated from vectors of different dimen-
sions are highly correlated (r > 0.7), which preliminarily suggests the
consistency of expertise with different dimension.
We further tested again Model 3 (for main effects and interaction
effects) with these new expertise values and the results are shown in
Table 8. For all the main effect and interaction effect of the independent
variables, the direction and significance of coefficients are independent
of the dimension (p < 0.05), which indicates that the dimension of
doc2vec has no impact on our conclusions.
6.3.2. Alternative measurement of expertise
As a robustness check, we constructed an alternative measure of
customer expertise and found consistent results. In previous models, we
used all textual information of users (i.e., customers and speakers) from
free knowledge sharing platforms to represent his/her knowledge ex-
pertise. This included the answers and articles s/he voted up or created.
However, there is a slight difference between “vote up” and “create”
activities. “Vote up” means users agree with the content written by
Table 7
Correlation matrix of expertise with different dimensions in doc2vec model.
doc2vec10 doc2vec50 doc2vec100 doc2vec200
doc2vec10 1 sumption, seeking to understand what factors influence customer sa-
doc2vec50 0.76 1
doc2vec100 0.73 0.92 1
doc2vec200 0.71 0.89 0.93 1 where users migrate from free to paid platforms. Previous studies
others, while “create” reflects content written by themselves. Hence, it is
worth considering that the characteristic document of each user could
be built in a single perspective, i.e. “vote up” or “create” separately.
Therefore, we then divide the entire documents to “voted-up text”
and “created text” for both speakers and customers. Since the dimen-
sion of doc2vec has no significant influence on results, we still set the
dimension to 200. We focus on what the customers are interested in, as
well as what the speakers are skilled in. Therefore, we measure ex-
pertisesc+av, which refers to the cosine of characteristic vectors of
speaker's created text and customer's voted-up text.
We then compare the results with overall expertise and ex-
pertisesc+av, as shown in the third column of Table 9. According to
Table 9, the results of independent variables and interactive items re-
main consistent with overall expertise in both direction and significance
(p < 0.1), which supports that our conclusions are solid with alter-
native characteristic documents.
6.3.3. Different text representation method
Since there are some other text representation methods besides
doc2vec model, we also conducted TF-IDF method as a way to model
users' knowledge background from the textual information. Afterwards,
the expertise of a customer towards a Live is calculated in a similar way
with that in Section 5. When conducting TF-IDF method, we only used
frequent Chinese words or phrases (which appeared no less than 5
times), ignoring number or English letter. Besides, for each character-
istic document, we preserved at most 1000 largest TF-IDF vector
components, and reduced others to 0. As shown in the fourth column of
Table 9, the results of independent variables and interactive items re-
main consistent in both direction and significance (p < 0.05) with that
when using doc2vec model. This further validates the robustness of our
conclusions.
7. Implication
7.1. Theoretical and methodological Implications
Firstly, we contribute to the research in online knowledge con-
tisfaction to the paid knowledge, especially under the background
mainly focus on maximizing the profit or sales [1,3-5], while ignoring

8
J. Zhang, et al. Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx

Table 8
Robustness check for doc2vec dimension.
N = 10 N = 50 N = 100 N = 200

Independent variable
Constant 4.09E−04 (0.161) 9.13E−04 (0.359) 8.79E−04 (0.345) 1.10E−03 (0.430)
Expertise 8.62E−03*** (3.374) 1.25E−02*** (4.860) 1.47E−02*** (5.667) 1.45E−02*** (5.512)
Current_Price −3.34E−02*** (−11.652) −3.33E−02*** (−11.628) −3.35E−02*** (−11.692) −3.34E−02*** (−11.677)
H_price 1.10E−02*** (3.770) 1.11E−02*** (3.785) 1.07E−02*** (3.631) 1.07E−02*** (3.640)
H_sat 5.83E−01*** (228.943) 5.83E−01*** (228.649) 5.83E−01*** (228.493) 5.83E−01*** (228.448)
Current_Price * Expertise 1.09E−02*** (3.619) 7.57E−03* (2.513) 1.28E−02*** (4.190) 1.21E−02*** (3.927)
H_price * Expertise −6.98E−03* (−2.448) −6.22E−03* (−2.277) −6.83E−03* (−2.541) −6.95E−03* (−2.572)
H_sat * Expertise −5.21E−03* (−2.052) −1.45E−02*** (−5.630) −1.50E−02*** (−5.840) −1.73E−02*** (−6.605)
Control variable
Duration 6.39E−02*** (18.477) 6.37E−02*** (18.416) 6.35E−02*** (18.356) 6.34E−02*** (18.339)
N_Q&A −7.77E−03* (−2.071) −7.79E−03* (−2.077) −7.42E−03* (−1.980) −7.60E−03* (−2.028)
N_File 1.61E−02*** (5.339) 1.64E−02*** (5.427) 1.63E−02*** (5.420) 1.63E−02*** (5.421)
N_AudioMessage 1.55E−02*** (3.546) 1.55E−02*** (3.554) 1.54E−02*** (3.521) 1.55E−02*** (3.553)
N_Live 4.16E−02*** (15.511) 4.15E−02*** (15.458) 4.15E−02*** (15.460) 4.18E−02*** (15.553)
N_Answer 4.25E−03 (1.392) 4.44E−03 (1.453) 4.26E−03 (1.393) 4.30E−03 (1.406)
N_Article −1.87E−02*** (−6.224) −1.85E−02*** (−6.170) −1.88E−02*** (−6.275) −1.91E−02*** (−6.359)
N_Follower 3.58E−02*** (11.677) 3.56E−02*** (11.626) 3.58E−02*** (11.689) 3.59E−02*** (11.721)
N_Followee 1.89E−04 (0.068) 8.74E−04 (0.310) −4.60E−05 (−0.016) 2.30E−04 (0.081)
N_Topic −1.26E−02*** (−4.866) −1.26E−02*** (−4.845) −1.24E−02*** (−4.764) −1.24E−02*** (−4.779)
Adjusted R2 0.3534 0.3536 0.3538 0.3538

All the variables are standardized to Z scores; t statistics in parentheses.

the post-purchase behavior. Instead, our study focus on customer sa-
tisfaction in online knowledge consumption, calling for attention to the
sustainable development of online knowledge payment platforms.
Secondly, we emphasize the role of customer expertise in online
knowledge consumption, which contributes to customer segmentation
research. In existing literature of knowledge consumption, scholars
mainly explore tag-based segmentation of knowledge provider (e.g.,
real name authentication [4] and gender [1]) and knowledge content
(e.g., topic [1]), while there are rare criteria for customer segmentation.
Given the challenge in knowledge quality perception, we draw our at-
tention to customer heterogeneity. Specifically, we extend our vision to
the rich user behavior data on free knowledge sharing platforms, which
contributes to depict the interest and specialty of users. We further
distinguish customers with different levels of expertise towards various
knowledge.
Thirdly, we contribute to value-percept diversity theory and adap-
tion level theory for revealing the different influence mechanisms under
varying expertise levels. In our research, we extend the psychological
theories to online knowledge payment context and found that expert
customers percept the knowledge quality differently compared to no-
vice customers, as well as different adaption levels.
Fourthly, our study clarifies the influence of price and historical
transactions on customer satisfaction in online knowledge consump-
tion. For example, although researchers have found the dual role of
current price as both economic cost and quality indicator, it remains
unclear which role takes effect under what situation. We investigated
the interaction effects between expertise and these main factors, and
find opposite directions for the effects with expert and novice custo-
mers, which provide us with a comprehensive view to understand the
mechanism of customer satisfaction to paid knowledge.
For the methodological implication, our measurement overcomes
the subjective bias and the problem of limited scale of participants in
empirical studies with self-reports. Besides, as the traditional mea-
surement is usually targeted at certain product/category, it is im-
possible to measure the customer expertise towards knowledge of var-
ious fields simultaneously. Given the diversity of customers and

Table 9
Robustness check for alternative measurement of expertise and text representation method.
Overall sc + av TF-IDF

Independent variable
Constant 1.10E−03 (0.430) 1.23E−03 (0.485) 6.48E−03* (2.426)
Expertise 1.45E−02*** (5.512) 2.26E−02*** (8.728) 7.53E−02*** (8.448)
Current_Price −3.34E−02*** (−11.677) −3.57E−02*** (−12.383) −3.35E−02*** (−10.774)
H_price 1.07E−02*** (3.640) 1.08E−02*** (3.661) 1.00E−02** (3.267)
H_sat 5.83E−01*** (228.448) 5.82E−01*** (228.377) 5.77E−01*** (214.364)
Current_Price * Expertise 1.21E−02*** (3.927) 1.32E−02*** (4.611) 3.05E−02*** (3.407)
H_price * Expertise −6.95E−03* (−2.572) −5.31E−03. (−1.932) −1.81E−02* (−2.368)
H_sat * Expertise −1.73E−02*** (−6.605) −2.41E−02*** (−9.390) −9.08E−02*** (−9.291)
Control variable
Duration 6.34E−02*** (18.339) 6.34E−02*** (18.348) 6.40E−02*** (17.901)
N_Q&A −7.60E−03* (−2.028) −6.97E−03. (−1.860) −8.08E−03* (−2.084)
N_File 1.63E−02*** (5.421) 1.76E−02*** (5.838) 1.67E−02*** (5.343)
N_AudioMessage 1.55E−02*** (3.553) 1.37E−02** (3.122) 1.52E−02*** (3.329)
N_Live 4.18E−02*** (15.553) 4.20E−02*** (15.655) 4.06E−02*** (14.521)
N_Answer 4.30E−03 (1.406) 2.26E−03 (0.738) 1.72E−03 (0.549)
N_Article −1.91E−02*** (−6.359) −1.75E−02*** (−5.820) −1.78E−02*** (−5.759)
N_Follower 3.59E−02*** (11.721) 3.59E−02*** (11.754) 3.63E−02*** (11.610)
N_Followee 2.30E−04 (0.081) 5.29E−04 (0.197) −1.40E−03 (−0.502)
N_Topic −1.24E−02*** (−4.779) −1.28E−02*** (−4.926) −1.43E−02*** (−5.363)
Adjusted R2 0.3538 0.3544 0.3532

All the variables are standardized to Z scores; t statistics in parentheses.

9
J. Zhang, et al.
knowledge purchased, the proposed measurement could measure the
customer expertise separately with the behavioral similarity of knowl-
edge customers and knowledge providers, which is specific to a certain
knowledge domain.
7.2. Practical implications
Knowledge sharing platforms become to gain much more profit by
developing derivative paid knowledge service. For sustainable devel-
opment, both knowledge providers and platforms should guarantee
customers' satisfaction to the paid knowledge, which requires selling
the right knowledge to the right customers at the right price.
Emphasizing the customer expertise as a new segmentation criterion,
our research distinguishes different reaction to price and historical
experience between expert customers and novice customers. Such dif-
ference would lead to opposite marketing decision to traditional stra-
tegies.
Firstly, traditional pricing strategies tend to reduce price to attract
more customers, since they enjoy the free knowledge and are unwilling
to pay high price. Given the same discount, the absolute reductions are
larger for expensive Lives. However, do customers of expensive Lives
really need such reductions? For most customers seeking advanced
knowledge in expensive Lives, they are probably quite expert in that
domain. According to our findings, they are actually less sensitive to
price. Therefore, the large reduction in expensive Live is indeed un-
necessary for expert customers, which provides a chance for knowledge
providers and platforms to expand their profits.
Secondly, traditional treatment for customer with strong purchasing
power could benefit from our research findings. Supposing a customer
with high historical price, traditionally s/he may be recommended with
Lives of his/her expert domain. According to our findings, the historical
price would largely improve his/her satisfaction for Lives of other do-
mains, compared to his/her expert domain. Therefore, Lives of di-
versified domains are better choices to take full advantages of his/her
purchasing power. Besides, expert customers who have adapted to both
high price and high quality should be provided with qualified Live,
while kept away from low-quality Lives with low prices.
Thirdly, solution for consumer dissatisfaction may be re-considered.
Suppose a critical customer who always gives worst ratings.
Traditionally, platforms may doubt that wrong domains are identified
for the customer and continue trying more diversified domains (even
the inexpert domains of the customer). However, such diversification
would amplify the negative impact of low historical satisfaction.
Instead of widely trying, platforms should return to the free knowledge
to find the expert domain of the customer, and stick to his/her expert
domains.
Fifthly, our study also sheds lights on the recommendation strate-
gies. Currently, platforms may recommend Lives to customers ac-
cording to their interest instead of expertise. However, our proposed
measurement of customer expertise provides new insights that plat-
forms can monitor customer expertise on free platforms, and then make
the appropriate recommendations. For example, for customers with low
expertise in movie, they should be firstly recommended for cheap Lives
to ensure their satisfaction. Then, platforms can enrich their knowledge
by recommending movie-related answers on free Q&A platforms or
inviting them to join the discussion on movie-related topics. After they
have accumulated enough knowledge, more sophisticated and ex-
pensive movie-related Lives could be recommended.
Finally, the proposed measurement of expertise also mitigates the
“cold start” problem in knowledge payment platforms. Generally,
knowledge payment platforms evolve from free knowledge sharing
platforms by capitalizing the popularity, and users won’t make a pur-
chase until they have fully experienced the free contents. Hence, for a
beginner user on paid platform (e.g., Zhihu Live), there are probably
some activity records such as reading or commenting on a free platform
(e.g., Zhihu). We could learn his/her knowledge distribution from those
10
Decision Support Systems xxx (xxxx) xxxx
activities with the doc2vec model. Then an expertise score can be cal-
culated and could be used as valid information before his/her purchase.
8. Conclusion and limitation
This study mainly investigates the moderate role of customer ex-
pertise in exploring the influential factors of customer satisfaction of
paid knowledge. Specifically, we first propose a novel measurement of
customer expertise based on the text-mining method, considering user
migration from free to paid knowledge platforms and incorporating
user activity information on these two platforms. By analyzing the data
collected from Zhihu and Zhihu Live, we find that with higher expertise,
the satisfaction of customers is less sensitive to price. Besides, expert
customers with high average price of historical transactions are more
difficult to satisfy in following transactions, while novice customers
with high historical price are easier to satisfy. Meanwhile, the sa-
tisfaction of expert customers is less dependent on historical satisfac-
tion.
The current study can be extended in several directions. Firstly,
some customers may purchase Lives without leaving reviews and rat-
ings. A possible way to validate our study is to conduct laboratory ex-
periments in similar situation, getting a random sample of customers
and accessing their true perception of satisfaction. Secondly, we re-
presented the knowledge of Live with the speaker's knowledge dis-
tribution for the measurement of customer expertise. This measurement
can be further enhanced by incorporating the content of Live, such as
audio, video, pictures and slides. Such multimedia content can be
modeled jointly with an advanced deep learning framework, which is
worth a separate study. Thirdly, the social network among users can be
further incorporated to the model in future work. Finally, building a
predictive model of the personalized ratings and generating knowledge
recommendations would also be an interesting future direction.
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Jin Zhang is an associate professor at the Department of Management Science and
Engineering, School of Business, Renmin University of China. He received his PhD degree
in the Department of Management Science and Engineering from the School of Economics
and Management at Tsinghua University. His current research interests include data
mining, business intelligence, and web search. His work has been published in journals
such as MIS Quarterly, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Decision Support Systems,
Information & Management, and IEEE Transactions on Neural Network and Learning
Systems.
Jilong Zhang is currently pursuing his PhD degree at the Department of Management
Science and Engineering, School of Business, Renmin University of China. His research
interests include recommender systems, text mining, and knowledge consumption. His
work has been published in the journal of Online Information Review.
Mingyue Zhang is an assistant professor at the Department of Management Science and
Engineering, International Business School, Beijing Foreign Studies University. She re-
ceived his PhD degree in the Department of Management Science and Engineering from
the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University. Her current research
interests include recommender systems, crowd funding, and online consumer behaviors.
Her work have appeared in journals such as ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery
from Data (TKDD), Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, International Journal of
Intelligent Systems, and Information Sciences.