Cooperation in a Peer Production Economy Experimental Evidence from Wikipedia.

Abstract

The impressive success of peer production -a large-scale collaborative model of production primarily based on voluntary contributions -is difficult to explain through the assumptions of standard economic theory. The aim of this paper is to study the prosocial foundations of cooperation in this new peer production economy. We provide the first field test of existing economic theories of prosocial motives for contributing to real-world public goods. We use an online experiment coupled with observational data to elicit social preferences within a diverse sample of 850 Wikipedia contributors, and seek to use to those measures to predict subjects' field contributions to the Wikipedia project. We find that subjects' field contributions to Wikipedia are strongly related to their level of reciprocity in a conditional Public Goods game and in a Trust game and to their revealed preference for social image within the Wikipedia community, but not to their level of altruism either in a standard or in a directed Dictator game. Our results have important theoretical and practical implications, as we show that reciprocity and social image are both strong motives for sustaining cooperation in peer production environments, while altruism is not.JEL classification: H41, C93, D01, Z13

Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia?

“…an increase in the number of recipients increases the total public goods provision but at a decreasing rate. This finding received empirical support in the context of online public goods, such as open-source software and online peer productive communities (Kandel and Lazear (1992), Comino et al (2007), Zhang and Zhu (2010), Algan et al (2013)). Comino et al (2007) find that the size of the "community of developers" in open-source projects increases the chances of progress but this effect decreases as the community gets larger.…”

Peer Effects in Collaborative Content Generation: The Evidence from German Wikipedia

“…The content in Wikipedia 4 can be very sensitive to the events happening outside it and, therefore, important instruments for enhancing attention spillover are exogenous shocks to the content (Kummer (2013)). The newly created empty articles can be considered as signals to experienced contributors that there is a demand on that type of content (Gorbatai (2011) (Osterloh and Rota (2007), Algan et al (2013)). …”

“…Studies focusing on Wikipedia point out that when the group of individuals is su ciently large, private benefits dominate free-riding incentives, thus enabling the provision of a public good (Zhang and Zhu (2010)). Voluntary contributions might bread recognition in the community or improve social image of an individual (Lacetera and Macis (2010), Algan et al (2013)) or contributions might be a↵ected by the feeling of reciprocity. Algan et al (2013) find that reciprocity matters for donations to Wikipedia, while Shriver et al (2013) and Harper et al (2010) Theoretical and empirical studies provide confronting views on the mechanisms that underlay the success or the failure of productive online communities.…”

“…Benkler (2002) compares peer production with traditional production by firms in the markets and suggests gains from peer production in terms of information collection cost and improved allocation due to availability of large sets of resources, agents and projects. Recent economic research advanced in understanding the role of social motivation for contributions to Wikipedia (Algan et al (2013), Zhang and Zhu (2010)). Zhang and Zhu (2010) find that the size of the recipient audience matters for the amount of knowledge contributed to Wikipedia.…”

“…Zhang and Zhu (2010) find that the size of the recipient audience matters for the amount of knowledge contributed to Wikipedia. Algan et al (2013) To address the endogenous network formation problem, I provide a set of robustness checks for the potential drivers of larger contributions such as external shocks to the content or self-selection into the network.…”