IBM Watson Research Center

Technical Report: When the experiment is over: Deploying an incentive system to all the users When the experiment is over: Deploying an incentive system to all the users Technical Report #: 08-08 Author(s): R Farzan, JM DiMicco, DR Millen, B Brownholtz, W Geyer, C Dugan Abstract A Collaborative User Experience Technical Report: more about CUE... Motivating user participation is an important issue for the survival of social web and social software applications. In our previous work demonstrated that a point-based incentive encourages contribution to a social networking site. This paper presents a follow-up analysis after a full deployment of the incentive mechanism to the entire user community. We address an issue uncovered in our previous experiment, we measure the long-term impact of the incentive mechanism on site content generation, and we replicate our previous result with a larger number of users. Our results will demonstrate that the incentive mechanism had a long-term effect on contribution levels and generated a second boost in contribution levels when released to a new set of users. The paper concludes with a discussion of our community’s reactions to the incentive mechanism collected through the site itself, company-internal blogs, podcasts, and forums. Full Report For more information, or to order a Technical Report, contact us.