What Makes Geeks Tick? A Study of Stack Overflow Careers

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Xu, Lei; Nian, Tingting; Cabral, Luis
• 署名单位: Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics; University of California System; University of California Irvine; New York University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2018.3264
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 587-604
• 关键词: Career concerns; online public goods; signaling; voluntary contribution

摘要

Many online platforms rely on users to voluntarily provide content. What motivates users to contribute content for free, however, is not well understood. In this paper, we use a revealed-preference approach to show that career concerns play an important role in user contributions to Stack Overflow, the largest online question-and-answer community. We investigate how activities that can enhance a user's reputation vary before and after the user finds a new job. We contrast this reputation-generating activity with activities that do not improve a user's reputation. After finding a new job, users contribute 23.7% less in reputation-generating activity; by contrast, they reduce their non-reputation-generating activity by only 7.4%. These findings suggest that users contribute to Stack Overflow in part because they perceive such contributions as a way to improve future employment prospects. We provide direct evidence against alternative explanations such as integer constraints, skills mismatch, and dynamic selection effects.