Towards Monetary Incentives in Social Q&A Services

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how monetary incentives influence user behavior and system dynamics in payment-based social Q&A platforms, revealing benefits and challenges of such models through data from Fenda and Whale.

Contribution

It provides a data-driven analysis of monetary incentives in CQA services, highlighting their effects on answer speed, user behavior, and platform sustainability.

Findings

Monetary incentives lead to faster answers from experts.

Users game the system to maximize profits.

Price adjustments by famous users impact their income and engagement.

Abstract

Community-based question answering (CQA) services are facing key challenges to motivate domain experts to provide timely answers. Recently, CQA services are exploring new incentive models to engage experts and celebrities by allowing them to set a price on their answers. In this paper, we perform a data-driven analysis on two emerging payment-based CQA systems: Fenda (China) and Whale (US). By analyzing a large dataset of 220K questions (worth 1 million USD collectively), we examine how monetary incentives affect different players in the system. We find that, while monetary incentive enables quick answers from experts, it also drives certain users to aggressively game the system for profits. In addition, in this supplier-driven marketplace, users need to proactively adjust their price to make profits. Famous people are unwilling to lower their price, which in turn hurts their income and engagement over time. Finally, we discuss the key implications to future CQA design.