An (Almost) Free Lunch? Social Recognition and Knowledge Sharing Behavior in a Virtual Community

This paper studies whether and how symbolic rewards based on social recognition affects the behavior of knowledge sharing in a self-organized virtual community. Applying coarsened-exact matching and difference-in-differences... [ view full abstract ]

This paper studies whether and how symbolic rewards based on social recognition affects the behavior of knowledge sharing in a self-organized virtual community. Applying coarsened-exact matching and difference-in-differences estimation methods to a longitudinal activity data from a virtual knowledge-exchange community, we find that awarding an online badge—a purely symbolic reward based on peer recognition—significantly boosts the quantity of the awardee’s knowledge sharing activities. This effect, however, is relatively short-lived. In contrast, the quality of contribution drops in both short term and long term. The badge award seems to trigger users to contribute more frequently in topic areas outside their previous knowledge domains, thereby helping expand the collective coverage by the community. Our subsequent result shows that this exploratory behavior is primarily responsible for the post-award drop in contribution quality. We find no evidence of reduced effort or cherry-picking behavior following the badge award. Our study highlights the quantity-quality trade-off in managing motivations in crowd-based knowledge-exchange communities and provides implications for designing an optimal incentive system in such settings.