Quantifying the selective, stochastic, and complementary drivers of the institutional evolution in online communities

TL;DR

This study empirically disentangles the roles of selective and stochastic forces in the evolution of online community institutions, revealing how different drivers influence rule dynamics and community stability.

Contribution

It applies evolutionary models to analyze institutional change in 20,000 Minecraft communities, highlighting the impact of selection and stochasticity on rule evolution.

Findings

Strong selection on administrative and information rules.

Stochastic drives reduce the frequency of administrative rules.

Institutional diversity enhances community stability and growth.

Abstract

Institutions and cultures evolve adaptively in response to the current environmental incentives, usually. But sometimes institutional change is due to stochastic drives beyond current fitness, including drift, path dependency, blind imitation, and complementary cooperation in fluctuating environments. Disentangling the selective and stochastic components of social system change enables us to identify the key features to organizational development in the long run. Evolutionary approaches provide organizational science abundant theories to demonstrate organizational evolution by tracking particular beneficial or harmful features. We measure these different drivers empirically in institutional evolution among 20,000 Minecraft communities with the help of two of the most applied evolutionary models, the Price equation and the bet-hedging model. As a result, we find strong selection pressure on administrative rules and information rules, suggesting that their positive correlation with community fitness is the main reason for their frequency change. We also find that stochastic drives decrease the average frequency of administrative rules. The result makes sense when explained in light of evolutionary bet-hedging. We show through the bet-hedging result that institutional diversity contributes to the growth and stability of rules related to information, communication, and economic behaviors.