Foundations for Investigating the Drivers of the Value Captured by Consumers Embedded within Social Shopping Networks

Exploiting the social network paradigm in the context of online shopping opens a new world of opportunities to sellers and consumers, and constitutes a new theoretically interesting domain for scholars to investigate. The present paper discusses why to study and how to theorize about online social shopping networks (OSSNs), defined as digital arrangements via which individuals connect to each other and engage with products. To do so, given the unique nature of OSSNs as information technology (IT) enabled multimodal networks (i.e., not just social networks and not just any IT), we review and leverage theoretical foundations from both social network and information systems research. As a result, an overarching conceptual framework is proposed as a guide for future research investigating how OSSNs generate value to their users.