Understanding the formation mechanism of high-quality knowledge in social question and answer communities: A knowledge co-creation perspective

•This paper concentrates on the underlying mechanism of high-quality knowledge creation in social Q&A communities.•We introduce a knowledge co-creation framework including users’ and the community’s effort.•The co-creation includes users' independent knowledge sharing behavior and collaborative knowledge integration behaviour.•The community’s technology promotes users’ contribution, thereby influences the knowledge quality. The social question and answer (Q&A) community provides people with an effective tool to obtain high-quality information. From the perspective of reciprocal determinism and value co-creation, this study aims to investigate the formation mechanism of high-quality knowledge in the community. We develop a model to investigate how cognitive factors and community technological factors influence users’ knowledge co-creation behavior, thereby influencing knowledge quality in the community. A survey of 382 knowledge contributors in a social Q&A community shows that knowledge self-efficacy, topic richness, personalized recommendation, and social interactivity have a positive impact on users' knowledge sharing and integration behavior, which subsequently affect the community’s knowledge quality. Moreover, users' ratings moderate the influence of knowledge sharing on knowledge quality. This research demonstrates the synergistic effect of people and technology in knowledge co-creation, thus advances literature about value co-creation and content quality in online communities.