Do Financial Incentives Induce More Online Participatory Behaviors?

Online community-based Question and Answer (Q&A) websites is popular in recent years. The main challenge for Q&A websites is how to motivate participations. Using a natural experimental dataset collected from a Chinese Q&A site, we apply difference-indifferences model with propensity score matching to evaluate the effect of emergency of a paid-for knowledge sharing activity on changes in the free sharing behaviors and social activities. Our results show that the paid-for activity allows users to share more knowledge freely and build more social ties in the site. The results suggest that the financial incentive can increase users’ participatory behaviors significantly.

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