Moderated Online Communities and User-Generated Content

Jianqing Chen (), Hong Xu () and Andrew B. Whinston ()
Additional contact information
Jianqing Chen: Haskayne School of Business, The University of Calgary
Hong Xu: McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin
Andrew B. Whinston: McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, http://www.utexas.edu/opa/experts/profile.php?id=422

No 09-11, Working Papers from NET Institute

Abstract: Online communities provide a social sphere for people to share information and knowledge. While information sharing is becoming a ubiquitous online phenomenon, how to ensure information quality or induce quality content, however, remains a challenge due to the anonymity of commentators. This paper introduces moderation into reputation systems. We show that moderation directly impacts strategic commentators incentive to generate useful information, and moderation is generally desirable to improve information quality. Interestingly, we find that when being moderated with different probabilities based on their reputations, commentators may display a pattern of reputation oscillation, in which they generate useful content to build up high reputation and then exploit their reputation. As a result, the expected performance from high-reputation commentators can be inferior to that from low-reputation ones (reversed reputation). We then investigate the optimal moderation resource allocation, and conclude that the seemingly abnormal reversed reputation could arise as an optimal result. The paper concludes with a discussion of the development of a scientific moderation system with application to academic publishing.

Keywords: moderation; reputation; online community; knowledge management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K21 L12 L41 L42 L63 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2009-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-ict and nep-law
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