Understanding Continuous Citizen Participation on a Green Commuting Platform: The Roles of Public Value and Private Value

Abstract

Citizen participation in IT-enabled social activity is an exchange between creating public value for others and gaining private value offered by public sectors in the perspective of social exchange theory. Prior literatures mostly focused on offline social activities and examined only the effects of participation antecedents on final participation outcomes, not investigating the potential participation mechanism in particular of the roles of public and private values. Thus, this study develops a theoretical model based on theories and incentives of citizen participation to examine what and how antecedents affect continuous citizen participation through public value creation and private value acquisition. With analyzing the survey data in the case of a Green Commuting platform, we identify the effective antecedents and find that private value acquisition has much greater effect on participation than public value creation and two values significantly mediate the effects of antecedents on participation.