| Title: |
Heavy Medal - The Consequences of Introducing Symbolic Awards on Contribution Behavior in Online Communities |
| Authors: |
Staub, Alexander; Grad, Tom; Lettl, Christopher |
| Source: |
Staub, A, Grad, T & Lettl, C 2022, Heavy Medal - The Consequences of Introducing Symbolic Awards on Contribution Behavior in Online Communities. in Digitization for the Next Generation., 2393, AIS Association for Information Systems, Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). < https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2022/user_behaivor/user_behaivor/18/ > |
| Publisher Information: |
AIS Association for Information Systems |
| Publication Year: |
2022 |
| Description: |
Online communities, like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow, have made a vast repository of knowledge available as a public good. However, they suffer from under-contribution in terms of quantity and quality. To tackle this issue, online communities have increasingly been relying on gamification, the use of game elements in non-game settings, to incentivize their members. The consequences of introducing such features on members’ behavior have remained elusive—partly due to the lack of controlled experiments. Herein, we take advantage of a natural experiment in which a technical online community introduced gamified rewards, which are awarded contingent on performance thresholds—termed performance contingent symbolic awards. Employing a difference-in-differences design using a comparable online community as a control group, we find that the introduction of performance contingent symbolic awards has a negative impact on the contribution behavior overall and that experienced members reduce their contribution quantity while inexperienced members reduce their contribution quality. |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| Language: |
English |
| Relation: |
info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/isbn/978-1-7336325-9-1 |
| Availability: |
https://research.wu.ac.at/de/publications/fc6dc46e-68ba-4e3a-87ce-1b0f00f93fe9; https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2022/user_behaivor/user_behaivor/18/ |
| Rights: |
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.B5872236 |
| Database: |
BASE |