Externalities in Knowledge Production: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Hinnosaar, Marit; Hinnosaar, Toomas; Kummer, Michael E.; Slivko, Olga

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3341630

Externalities in Knowledge Production: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

38 Pages Posted: 13 Mar 2019

See all articles by Marit Hinnosaar

Marit Hinnosaar

University of Turin - Collegio Carlo Alberto

Olga Slivko

ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research - Information and Communication Technologies Research Group

There are 3 versions of this paper

Date Written: March 1, 2019

Abstract

Do contributions to online content platforms induce a feedback loop of ever more user-generated content or will they discourage future contributions? To assess this, we use a randomized field experiment which added content to some pages in Wikipedia while leaving similar pages unchanged. We find that adding content has a negligible impact on the subsequent long-run growth of content. Our results have implications for information seeding and incentivizing contributions, implying that additional content does not generate sizable externalities, neither by inspiring nor by discouraging future contributions.

Keywords: user-generated content, Wikipedia, knowledge accumulation

JEL Classification: C93, L17, L86

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Hinnosaar, Marit and Hinnosaar, Toomas and Kummer, Michael and Slivko, Olga, Externalities in Knowledge Production: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment (March 1, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3341630 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3341630