 You scratch someone's back and we'll scratch yours: Collective reciprocity in social Q&A communitiesPhilip Fei Wu and Nikolaos Korfiatis () Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2013, vol. 64, issue 10, 2069-2077 Abstract: Taking a structuration perspective and integrating reciprocity research in economics, this study examines the dynamics of reciprocal interactions in social question & answer communities. We postulate that individual users of social Q&A constantly adjust their kindness in the direction of the observed benefit and effort of others. Collective reciprocity emerges from this pattern of conditional strategy of reciprocation and helps form a structure that guides the very interactions that give birth to the structure. Based on a large sample of data from Yahoo! Answers, our empirical analysis supports the collective reciprocity premise, showing that the more effort (relative to benefit) an asker contributes to the community, the more likely the community will return the favor. On the other hand, the more benefit (relative to effort) the asker takes from the community, the less likely the community will cooperate in terms of providing answers. We conclude that a structuration view of reciprocity sheds light on the duality of social norms in online communities. Date: 2013 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:64:y:2013:i:10:p:2069-2077 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology |
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