Do Incentive Hierarchies Induce User Effort? Evidence from an Online Knowledge Exchange

Abstract

UGC (User-generated content) websites routinely deploy incentive hierarchies, where users achieve increasingly higher status in the community after achieving increasingly more difficult goals, to motivate users to contribute. Yet the existing empirical literature remains largely unclear whether such hierarchies are indeed effective in inducing user contributions. We gathered data from a large online crowd-based knowledge exchange to answer this question, and drew on the goal setting theory to study users' contributions before and after they reach consecutive levels of a vertical incentive hierarchy. We found evidence that even though these "glory"-based incentives may motivate users to contribute more before the goals are reached, user contribution levels dropped significantly after that. In other words, the cumulative effect appears only temporary. Our results hence highlight some unintended and heretofore undocumented effects of incentive hierarchies, and have important implications for business models that rely on user contributions, such as knowledge exchange and crowdsourcing, as well as the broader phenomenon of "gamification" in other contexts.

Advances in Social Media Research: Past, Present and Future

“…Chau and Xu (2012) develop a framework capable of gathering, extracting, and analyzing blog information that can be applied to any organization, topic, or product/service. Goes et al (2016) study goal setting and status hierarchy theories to find that glory-based incentives motivate users to contribute more user-generated content only before/until the goal is reached, with the contribution dropping significantly later. examine Yahoo!…”

Designing Effective Performance Feedback Notification Systems to Stimulate Content Contribution: Evidence from a Crowdsourcing Recipe Platform

“…This difference can be explained by a number of factors. First, research has found that men tend to exhibit lower risk aversion [19] and are more likely to be overconfident [44,45], because they focus primarily on success and pay less attention to failure [45]. It has therefore been found that competition increases the performance of men, but not women [46][47][48].…”

“…First, females have been found to exhibit more sociallyorientated traits. It has been found that females tend to feel more empathy [49] and exhibit greater sensitivity to social cues [19] and others' moods and affect [50]. Because females are more socially attuned, they are more likely to notice others' unfavorable circumstances [51], and thus are more likely, in turn, to respond to others' needs.…”

“…According to the gender self-schema theory [55,56], males are more prone to exhibit a strong pro-self orientation and are more responsive to pro-self feedback [57]. Furthermore, studies suggest that males respond positively to competitive environment while females fail to perform or shy away from environments in which they have to compete [19,46]. With the above in mind, we therefore propose the following additional hypotheses:…”

“…Ample literature notes that SVO is highly correlated with gender, with males exhibiting greater pro-self tendencies and females exhibiting greater pro-social tendencies. For example, Van Lange [18] observed that "women were relatively more prevalent among prosocials and less prevalent among individualists and competitors," whereas Croson and Gneezy [19] report that "women are more averse to competition than are men." Bearing the above in mind, we explore the following research questions in this work: To answer these questions, we partnered with a large mobile crowdsourcing recipe application in China to conduct a randomized field experiment.…”