This paper studies the effect of online social networking functions on user participation with data collected from a Chinese online community. Leveraging on an exogenous change to the social networking function, we use a differences-in-differences approach to identify the effect of role identity salience on user participation. A formal theoretical model is proposed to investigate the equilibrium participation and friend network usage behavior. Predictions made from our theoretical model are

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... irmed by our empirical results. We also check the robustness of our result for different model settings and sub-samples. This research contributes to the IS literature about user participation in online communities. We extend previous literature by introducing another factor, role-identity, from the social economics literature, and empirically testing its significance with observational data. In this way, our research also contributes to the recent literature on empirical social economics.