What Makes Geeks Tick? A Study of Stack Overflow Careers
通过分析 Stack Overflow 用户找新工作前后的行为变化，发现声誉相关贡献减少 23.7%，而非声誉活动仅减少 7.4%，表明职业前景是用户免费贡献内容的重要动机。
Many online platforms rely on users to voluntarily provide content. What motivates users to contribute content for free, however, is not well understood. In this paper, we use a revealed-preference approach to show that career concerns play an important role in user contributions to Stack Overflow, the largest online question-and-answer community. We investigate how activities that can enhance a user’s reputation vary before and after the user finds a new job. We contrast this reputation-generating activity with activities that do not improve a user’s reputation. After finding a new job, users contribute 23.7% less in reputation-generating activity; by contrast, they reduce their non–reputation-generating activity by only 7.4%. These findings suggest that users contribute to Stack Overflow in part because they perceive such contributions as a way to improve future employment prospects. We provide direct evidence against alternative explanations such as integer constraints, skills mismatch, and dynamic selection effects. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.