PONE-D-22-09610What Factors Determine Users' Knowledge Payment Decisions? A Mixed-Method StudyPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Lee,

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Thank you for the opportunity to review this manuscript. The paper entitled "What Factors Determine Users' Knowledge Payment Decisions? A Mixed-Method Study" examines which psychological dimensions affect users' willingness to pay for knowledge content in the context of paid Q&A platforms. Overall, the paper is interesting and proposes an innovative and complex model to understand knowledge payment decisions. However, I suggest making some revisions to make the manuscript clearer and more precise.

Below I list some comments/suggestions that the authors may consider to further strengthen their manuscript.

- The article would benefit from a further revision by an English speaker and a copyeditor. Moreover, there are some typing errors, such as the absence of spaces between words throughout the entire manuscript.

- About the study design, the authors declare that they have conducted a mixed-method study, also specifying it in the title. However, the results of the qualitative study are not even hinted at. Based on the title of the paper, one would expect to read both qualitative and quantitative results. For this reason, I suggest changing the title of the paper or at least synthesizing what emerged from the qualitative study. In fact, all the variables that the authors have chosen to include in the model seem strongly anchored to the literature on the subject; therefore, one would wonder what contribution the qualitative study gave to the elaboration of the tested model.

- "Introduction" and "Literature review" are clear, however the authors might think of giving a more precise definition of the theories they cite from time to time, rather than taking them for granted, for example "flow experience theory" (p. 3, line 91) and "theory of perceived value" (p. 5, line 179).

- P. 6, lines 182-193, the authors state "Dou (2014) discovered that the utilised value of content items had a substantial impact on customers' payment behavior from the perspective of perceived risk". What do the authors mean by "perspective of perceived risk"?

- P. 7, lines 245-249, the authors state "An individual's psychology has an influence on his or her willingness to share knowledge in the virtual community; in recent years, many studies have indicated that the self-efficacy index of knowledge sharing is the chief distinguishing feature of self efficacy. Bock and Kim reveal that individuals' self-judgment of their contribution to an organization has a significant positive impact on knowledge sharing (Bock & Kim, 2002), while Atreyi,Tanbcy, and Wei also regard self-efficacy as an internal incentive to determine its effect on knowledge sharing (Atreyi et al., 2005)." It is not clear why the authors focus on the self-efficacy of knowledge providers and their knowledge sharing behavior if the focus of the research is on the sense of self-efficacy experienced by users (i.e., being confident of gaining relevant knowledge from the platform).

- P. 12, line 479, I think the authors should correct "variable inflation factor (VIF)" into "variance inflation factor (VIF)".

- P. 13, "Hypotheses test results" paragraph. Did the authors control for the effect of demographic characteristics on the estimated paths in testing the structural relationships?

- P. 14, "Discussion and Conclusions" paragraph. Before discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the study, the results of the analyzes (including non-significant ones) should be discussed and justified. Instead, the authors just summarize them. The reader may be interested in why some relationships didn't work out, for example, the reasons why self-efficacy does not affect community-related outcome expectations and cognitive dimension. Therefore, I suggest arguing all the results obtained.

- P. 16, "Limitations and future research" paragraph. Authors should recall the study's limitations, such as the use of self-report measures, the focus on intent to pay rather than actual user behavior, and the specificity of the target investigated (most participants were young adults and students), which could limit the generalizability of the results obtained.

Reviewer #2: The manuscript “What Factors Determine Users' Knowledge Payment Decisions? A Mixed-Method Study" explores the dimensions affecting willingness to pay for knowledge content in Q&A platforms. The research questions are surely relevant, and the development of the study effectively tackles core issues, for scholars and practitioners. I believe the paper is worth publication, after few major and minor amendments. Indeed, most of my suggestions are only devoted to enriching the overall readability and clarity of the paper.

Major remarks

It is not clear why Authors refer to mixed-method study if the entire manuscript presents only the results of a quantitative analysis. A couple of times it is cited a qualitative study, which outcomes however are never depicted. I invite Authors to provide full information about the qualitative study (and its contribution to the research development) or to modify the title (and narrative of the manuscript), clarifying the utility (and inputs) of the qualitative study.

Clarify the sample characteristics. It is currently reported as “non-random”, does it mean it is a convenience sample? Please state so. Additionally, in the results section (sample profile) it is stated [lines 456-457]: “The majority of the students in the sample (n = 349) studied for a Bachelor's degree or college..” Which leads readers to think that the sample is entirely formed by students (partially supported by the overwhelming majority of respondents aged between 20 and 39). Is this the case? Furthermore, the shortcomings stemming from a non-representative sample should be clearly reported in the results, discussion and limitations sections.

Minor remarks

I suggest that the manuscript receives professional English editing (several sentences are quite unclear, and the development is not easy to grasp).

Having seventeen research hypotheses, I would strongly advice Authors to add a summary table reporting the acceptance or rejection of each hypothesis.

Authors should provide a through description of the core limitations of the research (in the current version only future research are foreseen).

No information on ethical approval (or waiver) of the study is currently provided in the manuscript, neither information on the collection of informed consent from respondents (or any other ethical guideline followed by the researchers).

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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What Factors Determine Users' Knowledge Payment Decisions? A Mixed-Method Study

PONE-D-22-09610R1

Dear Dr. Lee,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Luigi Cembalo, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors responded exhaustively to all the questions raised and revised the manuscript accordingly. Thank you.

Reviewer #2: Authors have addressed all the raised comments provided in Round 1 in a convincing manner. Well done

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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