Group Size and Incentives to Contribute A Natural Experiment.pdfVIP

American Economic Review 101 (June 2011): 1601–1615 /articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.101.4.1601 Group Size and Incentives to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia By Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang and Feng Zhu* Many public goods on the Internet today rely entirely on free user contributions. Popular examples include open source software development communities (e.g., Linux, Apache), open content production (e.g., Wikipedia, OpenCourseWare), and content sharing networks (e.g., Flickr, YouTube). Several studies have examined the incentives that motivate these free contributors (e.g., Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole 2002; Karim R. Lakhani and Eric von Hippel 2003). In this paper, we examine the causal relationship between group size and incen- tives to contribute in the setting of Chinese Wikipedia, the Chinese language ver- sion of an online encyclopedia that relies entirely on voluntary contributions. The group at Chinese Wikipedia is composed of Chinese-speaking people in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other regions in the world, who are aware of Chinese Wikipedia and have access to it. Our identification hinges on the exogenous reduction in group size at Chinese Wikipedia as a result of the block of Chinese Wikipedia in mainland China in October 2005. During the block, mainland Chinese could not use or contribute to Chinese Wikipedia, although contributors outside mainland China could continue to do so. We find that contribution levels of these nonblocked contributors decrease by 42.8 percent on average as a result of the block. We attribute the cause to social effects: contributo