TY - JOUR
T1 - Motivating user-generated content with performance feedback
T2 - Evidence from randomized field experiments
AU - Huang, Ni
AU - Burtch, Gordon
AU - Gu, Bin
AU - Hong, Yili
AU - Liang, Chen
AU - Wang, Kanliang
AU - Fu, Dongpu
AU - Yang, Bo
PY - 2019/1
Y1 - 2019/1
N2 - We design a series of online performance feedback interventions that aim to motivate the production of user-generated content (UGC). Drawing on social value orientation (SVO) theory, we develop a novel set of alternative feedback message framings, aligned with cooperation (e.g., your content benefited others), individualism (e.g., your content was of high quality), and competition (e.g., your content was better than others). We hypothesize howgender (a proxy for SVO) moderates response to each framing, andwe report on two randomized experiments, one in partnership with a mobile-app-based recipe crowdsourcing platform, and a follow-up experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk involving an ideation task.We find evidence that cooperatively framed feedback is most effective for motivating female subjects, whereas competitively framed feedback is most effective at motivating male subjects. Ourwork contributes to the literatures on performance feedback and UGC production by introducing cooperative performance feedback as a theoretically motivated, novel intervention that speaks directly to users' altruistic intent in a variety of task settings. Our work also contributes to the message-framing literature in considering competition as a novel addition to the altruism-egoism dichotomy oft explored in public good settings.
AB - We design a series of online performance feedback interventions that aim to motivate the production of user-generated content (UGC). Drawing on social value orientation (SVO) theory, we develop a novel set of alternative feedback message framings, aligned with cooperation (e.g., your content benefited others), individualism (e.g., your content was of high quality), and competition (e.g., your content was better than others). We hypothesize howgender (a proxy for SVO) moderates response to each framing, andwe report on two randomized experiments, one in partnership with a mobile-app-based recipe crowdsourcing platform, and a follow-up experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk involving an ideation task.We find evidence that cooperatively framed feedback is most effective for motivating female subjects, whereas competitively framed feedback is most effective at motivating male subjects. Ourwork contributes to the literatures on performance feedback and UGC production by introducing cooperative performance feedback as a theoretically motivated, novel intervention that speaks directly to users' altruistic intent in a variety of task settings. Our work also contributes to the message-framing literature in considering competition as a novel addition to the altruism-egoism dichotomy oft explored in public good settings.
KW - Gender
KW - Performance feedback
KW - Randomized field experiment
KW - Social value orientation theory
KW - User-generated content
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85061258266&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85061258266&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1287/mnsc.2017.2944
DO - 10.1287/mnsc.2017.2944
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85061258266
SN - 0025-1909
VL - 65
SP - 327
EP - 345
JO - Management Science
JF - Management Science
IS - 1
ER -