信息管理与商业智能系学术讲座

时    间：2023年9月19日13：30-14：30

地    点：管理学院 李达三楼104室

题    目：Complementary or Substitutive? An Empirical Investigation of the Relationship between Social Content and Expert Knowledge Contributions in Online Q&A Communities

主持人：复旦大学管理学院信息管理与商业智能系 李根讲师

摘    要：

We study a novel strategy deployed by user-generated content (UGC) platforms to address underprovision. This strategy involves the use of an additional low-barrier content curation tool that allows users to post low-effort content distinct from the high-effort content that is standard on the platforms. It remains theoretically ambiguous whether the introduction of this low-barrier content tool complements or cannibalizes the contribution of high-effort content. By leveraging a quasi-experiment on a large Chinese online question-and-answer (Q&A) platform, we identify the causal effects of the low-barrier content tool on incentives for users to contribute high-effort content (i.e., answers to others’ questions) in a difference-in-differences framework. We find that the use of this low-barrier tool complements the contributed answers; adopters of the newly introduced low-barrier content tool increase their volume of contributed answers without compromising the effort spent on each answer. Further analyses suggest that the reason for this complementary effect might be that the additional content tool increases users’ engagement levels on the platform and prompts them to consume more knowledge content, increasing their incentives to contribute answers. Additional analyses show that this complementary effect is more pronounced for new users and users who mainly use the new tool to post knowledge-related content instead of personal, casual content. Our results have novel implications for platform designs and interventions to motivate users to contribute UGC.

信息管理与商业智能系

2023-9-12