Abstract

The rapid development of community group buying platforms has attracted a huge attention from both the practical and academic communities. Although previous research has explored the influence patterns of community group buying platform on the customers’ purchase intention, there are limited studies on how customers’ purchase intention is influenced by their participation behavior. Therefore, based on social identity theory, this study constructs a theoretical model of consumer participation influencing users’ purchase intention through community identity in the community group purchase context, and examines the moderating role of users’ privacy concerns in this process in conjunction with privacy concern theory to systematically explore the role of consumer participation on purchase intention and its boundary conditions. In this study, the data collected from 532 valid samples are analyzed by structural equation modeling. The results of the study found that customer engagement behavior had a significant effect on purchase intention through the mediation of community identity, where privacy concerns negatively moderated the effect of community identity on purchase intention. The study reveals the intrinsic mechanism of customer engagement influencing purchase intention and its boundary conditions, which provides the suggestions for the marketing management and business practice of community group platforms.