Towards Monetary Incentives in Social Q&A Services
This addresses the challenge of motivating experts in community Q&A services, offering insights for platform design, but it is incremental as it builds on existing incentive models with empirical data.
The study analyzed the impact of monetary incentives in payment-based Q&A services, finding that while they enable quick expert responses, they also encourage gaming behavior and require price adjustments for profitability, with celebrities' unwillingness to lower prices harming their long-term income and engagement.
Community-based question answering (CQA) services are facing key challenges to motivate domain experts to provide timely answers. Recently, CQA services are exploring new incentive models to engage experts and celebrities by allowing them to set a price on their answers. In this paper, we perform a data-driven analysis on two emerging payment-based CQA systems: Fenda (China) and Whale (US). By analyzing a large dataset of 220K questions (worth 1 million USD collectively), we examine how monetary incentives affect different players in the system. We find that, while monetary incentive enables quick answers from experts, it also drives certain users to aggressively game the system for profits. In addition, in this supplier-driven marketplace, users need to proactively adjust their price to make profits. Famous people are unwilling to lower their price, which in turn hurts their income and engagement over time. Finally, we discuss the key implications to future CQA design.