Jumping on the bandwagon? A longitudinal study on collaboration networks and decision to participate
Marco Tonellato, Guido Conaldi · Greenwich Academic Literature Archive (University of Greenwich) · 2010
In the context of self-managing teams, whether a member decides to voluntarily take action in a required task may depend on how many fellow members have already done so. In this kind of binary decisions with externalities bandwagon or 'herding' effects play a crucial role in individual decisions to undertake a specific course of action. Such effects have been linked to a broad set of phenomena including diffusion of innovation, segregation, and success of fads. Building on these general results, in this paper we conjecture that individual decisions to take on a task (i.e., the matching between individuals and jobs) are influenced by network relations generated by collaboration among team members. In order to explore our conjecture we collected data on a Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) project team consisting of 227 volunteer developers committed since 2002 to the development of a web browser. We reconstructed 2-mode co-collaboration networks (software developer by bug) in which a tie represents a voluntary action taken by a developer in order to solve a specific bug. Co-collaboration networks were collected for several six-month development cycles of the software. We report and discuss results of longitudinal actor-based modelling that we specify to test for the influence of local network structures on developer’s decision to take action on a specific bug. The study controls for bug-specific and developer-specific characteristics that may also affect developers’ decisions exogenously. We also control for priority and severity levels assigned by the team to bugs in an attempt to manage voluntary contribution.