Social badge system analysis

To incentivize users' participations, online social networks often provide users with various rewards for their contributions to the sites. Attracted by the rewards, users will spend more time using the network services. Specifically, in this paper, we will mainly focus on “badges reward systems”. Badges are small icons attached to users' homepages and profiles denoting their achievements. People like to accumulate badge for various reasons, which are modeled as the “badge values” in this paper. Meanwhile, to get badges, people also need to exert efforts to finish the required tasks, which will lead to certain “costs” as well. To understand users' badge achievement activities better, we will study an existing badge system launched in a real-world online social network, Foursquare, in this paper. A longer version of this paper is available at [14].