Do Incentive Hierarchies Induce User Effort? Evidence from an Online Knowledge Exchange
作者研究在线知识交换平台上的激励层级是否真的能促使用户付出努力。他们从大型众包知识社区收集数据，基于目标设定理论和地位层级理论，分析用户在垂直激励层级中达到连续等级前后的贡献变化。结果发现，虽然这些荣誉型激励可能在目标达成前激励用户多贡献，但达成后贡献水平显著下降，正面效应只是暂时的，而且对更高等级的影响越来越小。作者揭示了激励层级一些此前未记录的意外后果，对依赖用户贡献的商业模式（如知识交换、众包）以及更广泛的游戏化现象有重要启示。
To motivate user contributions, user-generated content sites routinely deploy incentive hierarchies, where users achieve increasingly higher statuses in the community after achieving increasingly more difficult goals. Yet the existing empirical literature remains largely unclear whether such hierarchies are indeed effective in inducing user contributions. We gather data from a large online crowd-based knowledge exchange to answer this question, and draw on goal setting and status hierarchy theories to study users’ contributions before and after they reach consecutive ranks on a vertical incentive hierarchy. We find evidence that even though these glory-based incentives may motivate users to contribute more before the goals are reached, user contribution levels drop significantly after that. The positive effect on user contribution appears only temporary. Moreover, such impacts are increasingly smaller for higher ranks. Our results highlight some unintended and heretofore undocumented effects of incentive hierarchies, and have important implications for business models that rely on user contributions, such as knowledge exchange and crowdsourcing, as well as the broader phenomenon of gamification in other contexts.