Motivating Experts to Contribute to Digital Public Goods: A Personalized Field Experiment on Wikipedia

Management Science. Evidence about incentives for expert contribution to digital public goods.

Authors: Yan Chen, Rosta Farzan, Robert Kraut, Iman YeckehZaare, Ark Fangzhou Zhang · Venue/status: Management Science · Year: 2023 · DOI

This paper uses a large personalized field experiment on Wikipedia to examine how domain experts respond to invitations to contribute to a public knowledge good. It distinguishes stated willingness from actual contribution and shows that expertise-task fit matters. The paper is central to the program because 1Cademy depends on the same problem: asking knowledgeable people to contribute to shared knowledge infrastructure when private incentives are limited.

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