Social Norms for Online Communities

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework for designing social norms that incentivize cooperation in online communities with features like anonymity, infrequent interactions, and reputation whitewashing, aiming to maximize social welfare.

Contribution

It introduces a formal model for sustainable social norms considering community-specific challenges and analyzes the structure and effectiveness of optimal norms.

Findings

Optimal social norms can sustain cooperation in online communities.

Punishment lengths and whitewashing significantly influence norm effectiveness.

Cooperation levels vary with community characteristics.

Abstract

Sustaining cooperation among self-interested agents is critical for the proliferation of emerging online social communities, such as online communities formed through social networking services. Providing incentives for cooperation in social communities is particularly challenging because of their unique features: a large population of anonymous agents interacting infrequently, having asymmetric interests, and dynamically joining and leaving the community; operation errors; and low-cost reputation whitewashing. In this paper, taking these features into consideration, we propose a framework for the design and analysis of a class of incentive schemes based on a social norm, which consists of a reputation scheme and a social strategy. We first define the concept of a sustainable social norm under which every agent has an incentive to follow the social strategy given the reputation scheme. We then formulate the problem of designing an optimal social norm, which selects a social norm that maximizes overall social welfare among all sustainable social norms. Using the proposed framework, we study the structure of optimal social norms and the impacts of punishment lengths and whitewashing on optimal social norms. Our results show that optimal social norms are capable of sustaining cooperation, with the amount of cooperation varying depending on the community characteristics.