Multi-Self Presentation and Knowledge Contribution in Platform Operations: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Abstract

Operations of online user-generated content (UGC) platforms often involve tackling the issue of underprovision wherein users lack motivations to contribute sufficient content. We study a novel design deployed by UGC platforms to address this issue, i.e., the implementation of an additional supplementary content curation tool that allows users to post diverse free-form content (e.g., casual social content) apart from the standard professional content on the platform.  Leveraging a quasi-experiment on a large Chinese online knowledge-sharing platform, we assess the effects of introducing such a supplementary free-form content tool on users' formal knowledge activity (i.e., writing answers to others' questions) on the platform. We find that if users adopted and frequently used the tool to post content, they also showed a stronger incentive to contribute answers without compromising the quality of each answer. These results are further validated by a set of robustness checks and instrumental-variable estimations. Further analyses suggest that such a complementary effect might be because of two mechanisms related to the new content tool's multi-self presentation function: First, the new tool increased adopters' engagement on the platform and led them to consume more knowledge content, which in turn facilitated knowledge contribution; Second, adopters attracted the attention of a larger audience by building a more complete self with the new tool. In addition, by employing a text-mining approach to calculate the semantic similarity between the free-form content and the formal professional content, we find the complementary effect to be more pronounced for adopters who posted a more balanced composition of serious and casual content using the new tool. Our results have novel implications for platform design and operations to motivate users to contribute valuable content.

Keywords: online knowledge-sharing, platform design, platform operation, contribution incentives, online multi-self presentation, difference-in-differences (DiD)