The Paradox of Novice Contributions in Collective Production: Evidence from Wikipedia

• In Event: 355 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 21. Production as Collective Behavior

Abstract

This study uses the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to examine the link between expert and novice producers of collective goods, and quality. In collective goods provision producers rarely know what goods are needed most because collective goods markets lack a clear allocation mechanism such as prices. First, I hypothesize that when potential contributors overcome free rider problems and create collective goods, these goods may fall short of consumer needs. Second, I propose a social mechanism through which producers respond to information about consumer needs across a set of heterogeneous public goods. Using a longitudinal dataset of 187 million contributions to Wikipedia article production and article demand data from October 2008 to February 2009, I model the contributions of novice and expert producers to article quality, and evaluate the relationship between consumer need and novice and expert contributions. Findings show that novice producers decrease article quality while expert producers increase it; and novice contributions to an article lead experts to contribute and increase the quality of the goods in response, fully mediating the relationship between need for articles and expert contributions. These results provide evidence that collective goods fail to satisfy consumer needs in absence of information from the latter, and highlight the paradoxical role of novices in providing information about these needs. This has implications for settings where public goods are produced by proposing that an open production design may alleviate a previously ignored but consequential problem related to collective good production: the failure to produce goods needed by consumers.

Author

• Andreea Gorbatai, University of California-Berkeley