Title: "Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia"Speaker: Professor Michael Zhang
abstract:
The literature on the private provision of public goods suggests an inverse relationship between incentives to contribute and group size. We find, however, that after an exogenous reduction of group size at Chinese Wikipedia, the unaffected contributors decrease their contributions by 41.4% on average. We attribute the cause to social effects: Contributors receive social benefits that increase with both the amount of their contributions and group size, and the shrinking group size weakens these social benefits. Consistent with our explanation, we find that the more contributors value social benefits, the more they reduce their contributions after the block.
bio:
Professor Michael Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management at theHong KongUniversityof Science and Technology. He holds a Ph.D of Management from MIT Sloan School of Management, a MSc in Management, a BE in Computer Science and a BA in English from Tsinghua University. Before joining the academia, he worked as a consultant for an investment bank, and as an international marketing manager for a high-tech company. He holds aUSpatent, and started a social network company. Professor Zhang’s research interests are on issues related to creation, dissemination and processing of information in business and management contexts. His works study pricing of information goods, online word-of-mouth, online advertising, incentives of creation in open source and open content projects, and use of information in financial markets.
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