Adaptive Incentive Mechanism for Sustainable Online Community
Julita Vassileva · 2005
Abstract. Over the last three years, we have been incrementally designing incentive mechanisms to encourage user participation in online communities. Our target community was a relatively small-scale, centralized, peer-to-peer community for sharing links to class-related resources. The users were students in undergraduate computer science classes, typically between 30-35 users. We found that most of the users responded to the incentive mechanism as we intended, but some users attempted to game the system. The excessive contributions resulted in “information overload ” and user withdrawal. To make the participation level in the community sustainable, we modified the incentive mechanism to discourage excessive contributions and elicit contributions with higher quality. This required adding a separate incentive mechanism to encourage users to rate each others ’ contributions and modifying the existing incentive mechanism so that it adapts to the users preferences and to the current needs of the community. The results showed that the timeliness, quality and type of contributions can be effectively influenced by the mechanism. Comtella: an online community for sharing links