How Do Peer Awards Motivate Creative Content? Experimental Evidence from Reddit
通过Reddit实地实验发现，匿名授予的同行奖励促使创作者发布更多、更长的内容，尤其对新成员效果显著，虽导致内容更趋同于自身过去，但因新成员本身更具新颖性，整体上增加了社区的新颖内容量。
We theorize peer awards’ effects on the volume and novelty of creative user-generated content (UGC) produced at online platform communities. We then test our hypotheses via a randomized field experiment on Reddit, wherein we randomly and anonymously assigned Reddit’s Gold Award to 905 users’ posts over a two-month period. We find that peer awards induced recipients to make longer, more frequent posts and that these effects were particularly pronounced among newer community members. Further, we show that recipients were causally influenced to engage in greater (lesser) exploitation (exploration) behavior, producing content that exhibited significantly greater textual similarity to their own past (awarded) content. However, because the effects were most pronounced among new community members, who also produce content that, in general, is systematically more novel than that of established members to begin with, this process yields a desirable outcome: larger volumes of generally novel UGC for the community. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.