Fostering Public Good Contributions with Symbolic Awards: A Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment at Wikipedia

This natural field experiment tests the effects of purely symbolic awards on volunteer retention in a public goods context. The experiment is conducted at Wikipedia, which faces declining editor retention rates, particularly among newcomers. Randomization assures that award receipt is orthogonal to previous performance. The analysis reveals that awards have a sizeable effect on newcomer retention, which persists over the four quarters following the initial intervention. This is noteworthy for indicating that awards for volunteers can be effective even if they have no impact on the volunteers' future career opportunities. The awards are purely symbolic, and the status increment they produce is limited to the recipients' pseudonymous online identities in a community they have just recently joined. The results can be explained by enhanced self-identification with the community, but they are also in line with recent findings on the role of status and reputation, recognition, and evaluation potential in online communities. History: Accepted by John List, behavioral economics. Open Access Statement: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt this work, but you must attribute this work as 'Management Science. Copyright [c] 2016 The Author(s). https://doi.org/10 .1287/mnsc.2016.2540, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License: https://creative commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.' Funding: The author acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Schweizerische Gemeinnutzige Gesellschaft, and the Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA), Switzerland. The experiment was reviewed and approved by the Research Directors of CREMA. Supplemental Material: Data and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/ mnsc.2016.2540. Keywords: economics * behavior and behavioral decision making * public good provision * awards and motivation * natural field experiment * Wikipedia * online community management
1. Introduction Wikipedia is an undisputed success story. It is the largest online encyclopedia, and its content is provided and cura ted by voluntary contributors (editors). As of May 2015, [...]