Experimental Study of Informal Rewards in Peer Production

We test the effects of informal rewards in online peer production. Using a randomized, experimental design, we assigned editing awards or “barnstars” to a subset of the 1% most productive Wikipedia contributors. Comparison with the control group shows that receiving a barnstar increases productivity by 60% and makes contributors six times more likely to receive additional barnstars from other community members, revealing that informal rewards significantly impact individual effort.

• Publication year

  2012

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2012-03-29

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Computer Science, Economics, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0034358PMID 22479610PMCID 3315525
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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