【主讲】亚利桑那大学教授Paulo Goes

【题目】激励等级可以诱导用户努力吗？来自于在线知识网站的证据

【时间】2015年6月2日（周二）10.30-12.00

【地点】清华经管公司伟伦楼513

【语言】英文

【主办】管理科学与工程系

【简历】Paulo Goes老师的简历

【摘要】To motivate user contributions, UGC (User-generated content) websites routinelydeploy incentive hierarchies, where users achieve increasingly higher status in the community after achieving increasingly more difficult goals. Yet the existing empirical literature remains largely unclear whether such hierarchies are indeed effective in inducing user contributions. We gathered data from a large online crowd-based knowledge exchange to answer this question, and drew on the goal setting theory to study users' contributions before and after they reach consecutive levels of a vertical incentive hierarchy. We found evidence that even though these "glory"-based incentives may motivate users to contribute more before the goals are reached, user contribution levels dropped significantly after that. The effect on user contribution appears only temporary. Our results highlight some unintended and heretofore undocumented effects of incentive hierarchies, and have important implications for business models that rely on user contributions, such as knowledge exchange and crowdsourcing, as well as the broader phenomenon of "gamification" in other contexts.