Incentivizing high-quality user-generated content

Abstract

We model the economics of incentivizing high-quality user generated content (UGC), motivated by settings such as online review forums, question-answer sites, and comments on news articles and blogs. We provide a game-theoretic model within which to study the problem of incentivizing high quality UGC, in which contributors are strategic and motivated by exposure. Our model has the feature that both the quality of contributions as well as the extent of participation is determined endogenously in a free-entry Nash equilibrium.