Is the propensity for individuals to act as market mavens - agents who are enthusiastic disseminators of generalized marketplace information as first introduced by Feick and Price (1987) in the Journal of Marketing - transferrable into virtual world environments? Further, if market mavenism is fluid across context (i.e. transferable from real-life settings to the Internet and relatively new technologies such as virtual worlds), what might facilitate this behavior? The market maven concept has received widespread support in physical (i.e. real-world) channels as well as Web-based channels and has inspired hundreds of replication studies and extensions; however, as Barnes and Pressey (2012: 167) note: "A notable absence from these studies is an understanding of market maven behavior in alternative communication channels", particularly in new social media platforms and virtual worlds. The present study extends the market maven concept by examining maven propensity in cyberspace. In addition to examining the presence of the cyber-maven in virtual world channels, we explore how such behavior is facilitated by examining the influence that 'flow' (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977, 1997) - the feeling of total immersion and deep involvement in human-computer mediated interactions (Novak, Hoffman and Yung, 2000) - has on cyber-maven propensity, and provide a demographic profile of the cybermaven.
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