Social Structure and Mechanisms of Collective Production
Subtitle: Evidence from Wikipedia
Contributors: Piskorski, Mikolaj J.; Hackman, Richard J.; Stuart, Toby E.; Marsden, Peter V.
Published: 2012
Language: eng
Description: In my dissertation I propose three counterintuitive social mechanisms to alleviate the risk that collective production will fail to maintain participant involvement and respond to demand. My first study, based on a panel dataset of edits and views of articles in the English Wikipedia, shows that, although collective production lacks a price-like mechanism to estimate demand for the goods it produces, consumers' contributions act as such a signal to expert producers. In the second paper I examine the theory that collective production participation is greatest when social norms of collaboration are obeyed. Using a large panel dataset of production networks and norm-related behavior in Wikipedia, I show that social norm infringement is not completely detrimental to participation because norm enforcement increases the likelihood that the beneficiary producer continues participating. In my third paper, I rely on interviews with experienced Wikipedia producers to examine whether producers' ties to non-participants in collective production increase the likelihood of turnover, and whether producers' embeddedness in collective production reduces turnover risk. Surprisingly, I find that producers with networks rich in ties to non-producers and with a task-oriented approach to collective production are those least likely to stop participating.
Notes: Keywords: collaboration, collective production, market failure, public goods, social mechanisms, social structure.

Thesis Ph.D. Harvard University 2012