Building Status in an Online Community

Inna Smirnova (), Markus Reitzig () and Olav Sorenson
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Inna Smirnova: School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
Markus Reitzig: Department of Accounting, Innovation, and Strategy, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria

Organization Science, 2022, vol. 33, issue 6, 2519-2540

Abstract: We argue that the actions for which actors receive recognition vary as they move up the hierarchy. When actors first enter a community, the community rewards them for their easier-to-evaluate contributions to the community. Eventually, however, as these actors rise in status, further increases in stature come increasingly from engaging in actions that are more difficult to evaluate or even impossible to judge. These dynamics produce a positive feedback loop, in which those who have already been accorded some stature garner even greater status through quality-ambiguous actions. We present evidence from Stack Overflow, an online community, and from two online experiments consistent with these expected patterns.

Keywords: status attainment; action ambiguity; online communities; stack overflow; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:33:y:2022:i:6:p:2519-2540

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