Contention and Contribution: How Divergence Encourages Discourse in the Collective Production of Movie Reviews

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

Abstract

Questions regarding why individuals decide to contribute to the collective production of public goods are increasingly important given the growth of technology enabled contemporary markets which aggregate the contributions of individuals into a single product. Examples include Yelp, Goodreads, and Metacritic, the site under study here. What drives users to overcome the temptation to free-ride and volunteer their efforts towards the creation of such collective goods? We advance a theory based on the premise that individuals are more likely to contribute if they feel their contributions will be valued. We draw on micro-level theories of minimal groups to explain macro-level outcomes. Specifically, we hypothesize that when there is more contention among participants, others will be more willing to take a side and contribute their opinions as well. We test and find support for our theory with data from the website, metacritic.com, which aggregates reviews of cultural products. In particular, we find that the more variance there is in movie reviews in one period, the more reviews are posted the next period. We also find that those reviews were from users who expressed more affinity for that type of movie in the past, suggesting the conflict activated identification.

Authors

• Ming De Leung, University of California-Berkeley

• Jue (Kate) Wang, Renmin University-China