Power Law Public Goods Game for Personal Information Sharing in News Comments

We propose a public goods game model of user sharing in an online commenting forum. In particular, we assume that users who share personal information incur an information cost but reap the benefits of a more extensive social interaction. Freeloaders benefit from the same social interaction but do not share personal information. The resulting public goods structure is analyzed both theoretically and empirically. In particular, we show that the proposed game always possesses equilibria and we give sufficient conditions for pure strategy equilibria to emerge. These correspond to users who always behave the same way, either sharing or hiding personal information. We present an empirical analysis of a relevant data set, showing that our model parameters can be fit and that the proposed model has better explanatory power than a corresponding null (linear) model of behavior.