Designing incentives for online question and answer forums

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Designing incentives for online question and answer forums

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Electronic Commerce archive
Proceedings of the tenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce table of contents

Stanford, California, USA

SESSION: Session 4 table of contents

Pages 129-138

Year of Publication: 2009

ISBN:978-1-60558-458-4

Authors

Shaili Jain	Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Yiling Chen	Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
David C. Parkes	Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGEcom: ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 28, Downloads (12 Months): 71, Citation Count: 0

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ABSTRACT

In this paper, we provide a simple game-theoretic model of an online question and answer forum. We focus on factual questions in which user responses aggregate while a question remains open. Each user has a unique piece of information and can decide when to report this information. The asker prefers to receive information sooner rather than later, and will stop the process when satisfied with the cumulative value of the posted information. We consider two distinct cases: a complements case, in which each successive piece of information is worth more to the asker than the previous one; and a substitutes case, in which each successive piece of information is worth less than the previous one. A best-answer scoring rule is adopted to model Yahoo! Answers, and is effective for substitutes information, where it isolates an equilibrium in which all users respond in the first round. But we find that this rule is ineffective for complements information, isolating instead an equilibrium in which all users respond in the final round. In addressing this, we demonstrate that an approval-voting scoring rule and a proportional-share scoring rule can enable the most efficient equilibrium with complements information, under certain conditions, by providing incentives for early responders as well as the user who submits the final answer.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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