What Are Social Incentives Worth? A Randomized Field Experiment in User Content Generation

The under-provision of user-generated content (UGC) has reportedly resulted in the demise of many an online community. In recent years, a number of scholars have undertaken studies of possible incentives to stimulate UGC production. The incentives that have been considered to date can generally be classified into one of two groups: social and monetary. Chen et al. (2010) provide an example of work exploring social incentives. Those authors found that supplying users with information about the average number of movie reviews written by peers caused a regression toward the average; treated users initially contributing below the median increased their production sharply, while those initially contributing above the median reduced their production. Wang et al. (2012) provide an example of work looking at monetary incentives. Conducting a study at Amazon Mechnical Turk, they reported no significant differences in the baseline quality of paid and unpaid reviews, but they did report that review quality could be improved via quality-contingent bonuses.