Mechanism of Quantified-Self Consciousness in Customer Participation Behavior: Based on Self Concept Theory

The era of big data has driven quantified-self activity to become a common mass-life practice, yet there is a necessity of research on how to navigate through this problem now that quantified-self activity often produces results that are contrary to the original intent and creates data anxiety. Therefore, understanding the psychological dimension of the quantified-self would give new perspectives on individual and organization oriented positive outcomes. This study proposed the concept of quantified-self consciousness (QSC) based on the psychological dimension and investigated how customers' QSC influences their participation behavior in online contexts. Utilizing self-concept theory, this study incorporate extroversion and tie strength as moderating variables to refine the framework from both individual and organization perspectives. The results informed that QSC positively influences customers' information, task, and personal interactive behavior and is mediated by the variable arousal. At the individual level, customers with extroversion were more inclined to join in participation behavior, whereas at organization level, tie strength in the online community only moderated the path of QSC acting on task interactive behavior. These findings provide positive implications for how customers should act in the face of quantitative information to alleviate the anxiety and aversion associated with information overload, and provides companies with concrete strategies for managing online marketing.