Lunch-Seminar CIREQ-Concordia 2019-2020
joint with the Department of Economics, Concordia University
room H-1154 (Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd West, 11th floor)
Organizer : Huan Xie (Concordia U.)
RÉSUMÉ
This paper particularly identifies the incentive effect of peer recognition on the content provision online. Using unique data from the Chinese biggest Question-and-Answer Platform, we analyzed the time data of all the influencers with more than 10,000 followers on the platform for two years. We find that the OLS method leads to underestimating the incentive of “peer recognition” for online creation, which mainly comes from two channels: reputation and privacy concern. In the meanwhile, our estimation results suggest that peer incentives affect individual and commercial users differently: commercial users tend to overreact for “marketing purposes.” Such results indicate that platform policies may engender externalities on the marketing strategies of commercial content producers, thus changing the diversity of contents.
Keywords : Peer recognition, Content provision, Question-and-Answer platform
JEL Classification : C26, L82, M14
