Steering user behavior with badges

Abstract

An increasingly common feature of online communities and social media sites is a mechanism for rewarding user achievements based on a system of badges. Badges are given to users for particular contributions to a site, such as performing a certain number of actions of a given type. They have been employed in many domains, including news sites like the Huffington Post, educational sites like Khan Academy, and knowledge-creation sites like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow. At the most basic level, badges serve as a summary of a user's key accomplishments; however, experience with these sites also shows that users will put in non-trivial amounts of work to achieve particular badges, and as such, badges can act as powerful incentives. Thus far, however, the incentive structures created by badges have not been well understood, making it difficult to deploy badges with an eye toward the incentives they are likely to create.In this paper, we study how badges can influence and steer user behavior on a site-leading both to increased participation and to changes in the mix of activities a user pursues on the site. We introduce a formal model for reasoning about user behavior in the presence of badges, and in particular for analyzing the ways in which badges can steer users to change their behavior. To evaluate the main predictions of our model, we study the use of badges and their effects on the widely used Stack Overflow question-answering site, and find evidence that their badges steer behavior in ways closely consistent with the predictions of our model. Finally, we investigate the problem of how to optimally place badges in order to induce particular user behaviors. Several robust design principles emerge from our framework that could potentially aid in the design of incentives for a broad range of sites.

Personal Bests as Reference Points

“…We find evidence of a goal gradient, or the increase in intensity often observed when a goal is imminent (17)(18)(19), for roundnumbered ratings but not for personal bests. The probability of quitting decreases as ratings approach a multiple of 100 but stays flat as ratings approach personal bests.…”

Gamified Incentives: A Badge Recommendation Model to Improve User Engagement in Social Networking Websites

“…The first topic is about the study of badge effects in user behaviour and their use to steer and control user actions; leading both to increase participation and changes in activities a user seeks on the website [12], [13]. In this subject, Denny in [8] has worked on the effect of badges on students' engagement in an online learning tool.…”

“…There are also some papers on badge design and placement problem which works on the idea of how to ideally place badges in our system and how should we design them to induce particular user behaviours the way we want [12], [14]. For this matter, Antin and Churchill in [10] presented a conceptual organisation for different types of badges with concentrating on social psychological perspective.…”

Geo-locating the knowledge transfer in StackOverflow

“…SO can be viewed as a collective effort to solve common problems of those who participate [12] with motivational drivers very similar to those to be found in scientific and OSS communities [8]. Badges used on SO have also been shown to increase and steer users behaviour [2], [7].…”