Affordances of Virtual World Commerce: Instrument Development and Validation

This paper addresses the affordances of the social and business environment of a virtual world, which we classify into three types: physical, relational, and transactional affordances. This preliminary study contributes to research in virtual worlds design and the study of the theory of affordances by addressing the importance of affordances in the design and support of business functions in virtual worlds. This paper presents the development of a measurement instrument for these three types and reports the initial validation of the scales using a survey of users from the Second Life virtual world. The results show a good fit for the model structure and high reliability and validity of the measurement scales. The next step is to use these and other constructs to predict the success or failure of commerce in a virtual world.