Online Public Goods
(2023)
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- Abstract
- This thesis studies how individuals participate in online communities. Prior research has shown that individuals participating in online communities have motivations beyond themselves. In other words, they choose to contribute to the community out of some degree of social concern. By understanding these motivations, I study how individuals interact in two types of online communities: crowd-based ratings and open-source software. The first two chapters of this thesis focus on the study of crowd-based ratings. The first chapter studies how consumers who exhibit reciprocity generate ratings. Consumer reciprocity to firms means they provide ratings based on the value-for-money they receive, which allows firms to use prices to influence ratings. Because firms may manipulate ratings, ratings can fail to reflect product quality. Even when ratings fail to reflect product quality, they may not harm consumers. The second chapter studies how consumers interpret ratings under different information environments. When see ratings, they can sometimes learn the preferences of raters or have access to more detailed product information. In an experiment, we show how rater and consumer behavior changes in each environment, finding that consumers respond more to learning the preferences of raters. The third chapter studies the open-source software community. I adopt the motivations of developers, accounting for their preference to develop software features they care about. I discuss how coordinators choose to manage open-source software development and show that competitive effects arising from open-source software are likely understated.
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Citations
Ng, R. (2023). Online Public Goods. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/30925