ABSTRACT
An increasingly common feature of online communities and social media sites is a mechanism for rewarding user achievements based on a system of badges. Badges are given to users for particular contributions to a site, such as performing a certain number of actions of a given type. They have been employed in many domains, including news sites like the Huffington Post, educational sites like Khan Academy, and knowledge-creation sites like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow. At the most basic level, badges serve as a summary of a user's key accomplishments; however, experience with these sites also shows that users will put in non-trivial amounts of work to achieve particular badges, and as such, badges can act as powerful incentives. Thus far, however, the incentive structures created by badges have not been well understood, making it difficult to deploy badges with an eye toward the incentives they are likely to create.
In this paper, we study how badges can influence and steer user behavior on a site---leading both to increased participation and to changes in the mix of activities a user pursues on the site. We introduce a formal model for reasoning about user behavior in the presence of badges, and in particular for analyzing the ways in which badges can steer users to change their behavior. To evaluate the main predictions of our model, we study the use of badges and their effects on the widely used Stack Overflow question-answering site, and find evidence that their badges steer behavior in ways closely consistent with the predictions of our model. Finally, we investigate the problem of how to optimally place badges in order to induce particular user behaviors. Several robust design principles emerge from our framework that could potentially aid in the design of incentives for a broad range of sites.
- J. Antin and E. Churchill. Badges in social media: A social psychological perspective. In CHI Workshop on Gamification, 2011.Google Scholar
- M. Babaioff, S. Dobzinski, S. Oren, and A. Zohar. On bitcoin and red balloons. In ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, pages 56--73, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. Becker and V. Weispfenning. Gröbner Bases: A Computational Approach to Commutative Algebra. Springer, 1993. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. H. Bishop. Incentives for learning: Why american high school students compare so poorly to their counterparts overseas. Technical Report CAHRS 89-09, Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 1989.Google Scholar
- M. Burke, C. Marlow, and T. M. Lento. Feed me: motivating newcomer contribution in social network sites. In ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 945--954, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Burke and B. Settles. Plugged in to the community: social motivators in online goal-setting groups. In International Conference on Communities and Technologies, pages 1--10, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Cebrián, L. Coviello, A. Vattani, and P. Voulgaris. Finding red balloons with split contracts: robustness to individuals' selfishness. In ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, pages 775--788, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Chawla, J. D. Hartline, and B. Sivan. Optimal crowdsourcing contests. In ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pages 856--868, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Deterding, M. Sicart, L. Nacke, K. O'Hara, and D. Dixon. Gamification: Using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts. In CHI Workshop on Gamification, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Digital Media and Learning Competition. Badges for lifelong learning. http://dmlcompetition.net/competition/4/badges-competition-cfp.php.Google Scholar
- S. Frederick, G. Loewenstein, and T. O'Donoghue. Time discounting and time preference: A critical review. Journal of Economic Literature, 40(2):351--401, 2002.Google ScholarCross Ref
- A. Ghosh and R. P. McAfee. Incentivizing high-quality user-generated content. In International World Wide Web Conference, pages 137--146, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Kleinberg and P. Raghavan. Query incentive networks. In IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pages 132--141, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. K. Kopalle and S. A. Neslin. The economic viability of frequency reward programs in a strategic competitive environment. Review of Marketing Science, 1, 2003.Google Scholar
- M. Lewis. The influence of loyalty programs and short-term promotions on customer retention. Journal of Marketing Research, 41(3), 2004.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mozilla. Open badges. http://openbadges.org/en-US/.Google Scholar
- H. L. O'Brien and E. G. Toms. What is user engagement? a conceptual framework for defining user engagement with technology. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(6):938--955, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- H. Oktay, B. Taylor, and D. Jensen. Causal discovery in social media using quasi-experimental designs. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Media Analytics, pages 1--9. ACM, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. Singer. You've won a badge (and now we know all about you). New York Times, 4 February 2012.Google Scholar
- H. Zhang, D. C. Parkes, and Y. Chen. Policy teaching through reward function learning. In ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, pages 295--304. ACM, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Steering user behavior with badges
Recommendations
Incentives, Gamification, and Game Theory: An Economic Approach to Badge Design
Special Issue on EC'13Gamification is growing increasingly prevalent as a means to incentivize user engagement of social media sites that rely on user contributions. Badges, or equivalent rewards, such as top-contributor lists that are used to recognize a user's ...
On the Causal Effect of Badges
WWW '18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web ConferenceA wide variety of online platforms use digital badges to encourage users to take certain types of desirable actions. However, despite their growing popularity, their causal effect on users» behavior is not well understood. This is partly due to the lack ...
Badges of Friendship: Social Influence and Badge Acquisition on Stack Overflow
HICSS '14: Proceedings of the 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System SciencesBadges can provide a number of advantages to networked, self-directed learners, including making visible social networks of support and direction. If badges do allow for this, we would expect to see badge acquisition to be predicted by the presence of a ...
Comments