How Do Peer Awards Motivate Creative Content? Experimental Evidence from Reddit

Gordon Burtch, Qinglai He (), Yili Hong () and Dokyun Lee ()
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Qinglai He: Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706
Yili Hong: C.T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204
Dokyun Lee: Questrom School of Business, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215

Management Science, 2022, vol. 68, issue 5, 3488-3506

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: peer awards; user-generated content; creativity; Reddit; text-mining; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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