HOW BEHAVIOR OF USERS IMPACTS THE SUCCESS OF ONLINE Q&A COMMUNITIES

Fan Yu and Marco A. Janssen ()
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Fan Yu: Simon A. Levin Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Sciences Center, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona USA
Marco A. Janssen: School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona USA

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2020, vol. 23, issue 06, 1-23

Abstract: What makes Question & Answer (Q&A) communities productive? In this paper, we look into how the diversity of behavioral types of agents impacts the performance of Q&A communities using different performance metrics. We do this by developing an agent-based model informed by insights from previous studies on Q&A communities. By analyzing the different strategies for how questions are selected to answer, we find that there are mixtures of strategies leading to the best outcomes for different performance conditions. Particularly, Q&A communities that encourage participants to focus on answering the new questions reach the best performance in answering the questions, creating the long term value, and improving the competence of solving difficulty. In conclusion, we find that the current strategies of question selection on Stack Overflow are in line with the high performance of producing public benefit from the collective attention available.

Keywords: Attention; collective behavior; online Q&A community (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525920500150

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