Analyzing the Influence of Opinion Leaders on Consumers’ Purchase Intention in the Context of Social E-commerce

Abstract

With the development of social e-commerce, consumers prefer to refer to information shared by opinion leaders when
making purchase decisions. Opinion leader infl uence has become one of the most important research topics in the academic fi eld. However,
Previous researches lack consideration of the development of the social e-commerce environment. There is also few study that combines
the relationship between opinion leaders and consumers for analysis. Thus, this study proposes a conceptual model based on the theory of
consumption value (TCV) to describe opinion leaders’ infl uence and tests the research model through structural equation modeling from the
perspectives of individual characteristics of opinion leaders, characteristics of content recommended by opinion leaders, the relationship
between opinion leaders and consumers, and the perceived value of consumers. The results show that opinion leaders’ product involvement
and popularity, the homophily between opinion leaders and consumers, and informativeness of the content positively infl uence consumers'
perceived functional value and thus their purchase intention.