How Do Peer Awards Motivate Creative Content? Experimental Evidence from Reddit

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Burtch, Gordon; He, Qinglai; Hong, Yili; Lee, Dokyun
• 署名单位: Boston University; University of Wisconsin System; University of Wisconsin Madison; University of Houston System; University of Houston
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2021.4040
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 3488-3506
• 关键词: peer awards; user-generated content; creativity; Reddit; Text-mining; experiment

摘要

We theorize peer awards' effects on the volume and novelty of creative user -generated content (UGC) produced at online platform communities. We then test our hypotheses via a randomized field experiment on Reddit, wherein we randomly and anonymously assigned Reddit's Gold Award to 905 users' posts over a two-month period. We find that peer awards induced recipients to make longer, more frequent posts and that these effects were particularly pronounced among newer community members. Further, we show that recipients were causally influenced to engage in greater (lesser) exploitation (exploration) behavior, producing content that exhibited significantly greater textual similarity to their own past (awarded) content. However, because the effects were most pronounced among new community members, who also produce content that, in general, is systematically more novel than that of established members to begin with, this process yields a desirable outcome: larger volumes of generally novel UGC for the community.