Show Me the Incentives for Blogging: A Dynamic Structural Model of Employee Behavior

Many firms believe that enterprise blogging forums can be used to help build the structured platform required for an environment that supports emergent innovation. While some employees tend to be 'consumers' of content created by others, some others contribute by acting as 'creators'. In this paper, we build and estimate a theory-based dynamic structural model towards understanding the mechanisms that incentivize users to contribute to blog forums that are consumed by employees across the organization. We find strong evidence of competitive dynamics in our enterprise wide data setting. Our results demonstrate why employees contribute to blog forums and how these effects vary based on whether these are senior management employees or junior-level employees. We find that employees derive higher utility from readership of their work-related posts than their leisure-related posts. The low status employees derive higher self-expression utility from posting than high status employees. Further, in comparison to low status employees, high status employees continue to benefit more from past reputation. We also find that knowledge-based benefits are higher for low status employees and that low status employees feel higher levels of peer pressure to hold or generate knowledge than high status employees. Our results suggest that enterprises would benefit more from feedback systems that provide a picture of how knowledge workers in the organization are interacting with the tools are made available to them. We discuss implications for implementing feedback systems that quantify the reputation of the content creator and incentivize employees to engage in this practice.