Listen to Your Users? Self-Selection in User Community Feedback and Commercial Impact
研究发现，企业采纳用户社区反馈可能损害产品商业表现，因为社区参与者是自我选择的，其偏好可能偏离主流市场；只有当社区用户分布与整体市场相似时，采纳反馈才能提升销售。
Firms increasingly involve user communities in product development, and prior research documents many benefits in idea generation, knowledge sharing, and cost reduction. We theorize, however, that incorporating market feedback about products from these communities can harm products’ commercial performance. Because community feedback is volunteered by self-selected participants rather than sampled to represent the broader market, it may mislead firms when narrow community preferences diverge from mainstream demand. We predict that greater incorporation of community feedback will increase positive evaluations of a product within the community, but undermine its broader commercial success when there are strong user self-selection pressures (like for initially niche-targeted games). We test this theory in the personal-computer (PC) video-game industry using Steam Early Access, where developers integrate community feedback prior to release. Using a multimethod design that combines large-scale archival analyses with interviews of developers, executives, and community members, we find that feedback incorporation during Early Access improves post-launch commercial outcomes of games only when the Early Access community closely mirrors the distribution of users in the broader Steam market. However, in unrepresentative communities—even large ones—greater incorporation predicts lower post-launch revenues despite favorable community evaluations.