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| Title: | Group Size and Incentive to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia |
| Authors: | Zhang, Michael - HKUST Business School
Zhu, Feng - Harvard University |
| Keywords: | incentive to contribute; group size; public goods; social effects |
| Issue Date: | 2007 |
| Series/Report no.: | NET Institute Working Paper;07-22 |
| Abstract: | The literature of private provision of public goods suggests that
incentive to contribute is inversely related to group size. This paper
empirically tests this relationship using field data from Chinese
Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We exploit an exogenous reduction in
group size as a result of the blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China
and examine whether individual contributions increase after the block as
predicted in the literature. Our result indicates the opposite:
individual contribution of unaffected contributors decreases by 42% on
average as a result of the block. We attribute the cause to social
effects: contributors care about the number of beneficiaries of their
contributions. We build a simple model to illustrate how social effects
and group size affect individual incentive to contribute. Consistent
with our model prediction, we find that the more a contributor values
social recognition, the greater the reduction in her contributions after
the block. A series of robustness checks appear to support our explanation. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/28501 |
| Appears in Collections: | NET Institute Working Papers Series
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