Motivating Experts to Contribute to Digital Public Goods: A Personalized Field Experiment on Wikipedia

Increasing personal data contributions for the greater public good: a field experiment on an online education platform

“…Granted these limitations, we see three general takeaways from our results. First, they suggest that the size of beneficiaries positively influences the provision of personal data to a public good similarly to what has been shown in more classical public goods settings (Ledyard, 1995;Goeree et al, 2002;Ling et al, 2005;Andreoni, 2007;Zhang & Zhu 2011;Diederich et al, 2016;Wang & Zudenkova, 2016;Chen et al, 2020). This means that in the context of a public good that uses personal data as inputs, a simple and inexpensive pop-up message making the public benefit of personal information provision salient can be very effective.…”

“…So far it is not clear whether behavioral interventions that have proven effective for other types of contributions to public goods (Frey & Meier, 2004;Ling et al, 2005;Andreoni, 2007;Shang & Croson, 2009;Chen et al, 2010Chen et al, , 2020Krupka & Croson, 2015) translate to personal data. In a field experiment on one of Germany's largest online education platforms, we show that a classical remedy in the sphere of public goods fundingemphasis on a large circle of beneficiaries (Andreoni, 2007;Zhang & Zhu, 2011) also significantly increases users' willingness to contribute personal data.…”

“…Otherwise, the quality of the public good may suffer. While other types of individual-specific contributions to public goods have already been studied, for example, knowledge (Zhang & Zhu, 2011;Chen et al, 2020) and feedback (Bolton et al, 2004;Ling et al, 2005;Chen et al, 2010;Cabral & Li, 2015;Bolton et al, 2020), personal data as contributions have so far been neglected. We study whether insights on how to boost other types of contributions transfer to personal data.…”

“…7 Yet, as results by Ling et al (2005) show the exact wording is important for actually achieving positive effects. 8 For knowledge as an individual-specific contribution to a public good, studies on Wikipedia show that a combination of private and public benefits (Chen et al, 2020) as well as a large number of beneficiaries (Zhang & Zhu, 2011) determine contributions to the public information good. 9 Building on these insights, we implement behaviorally informed interventions in a field experiment, which aim at increasing personal data sharing, a new form of an individual-specific contribution to a public good.…”

Preference for Identification in the Field – Nudging Refugees’ Integration Effort

“…This is an exceptionally high rate, compared to other studies using email interventions (e.g. Chen et al, 2018) and might indicate a high interest in the language related emails.…”