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Does the Framing of Progress Towards Virtual Rewards Matter?

Empirical Evidence from an Online Community

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Abstract

A natural experiment on a popular German Question & Answer community is used to find out whether the small-area hypothesis applies to user activation by means of a virtual reward in the form of badges. Koo and Fishbach’s small-area hypothesis posits that individuals in pursuit of a goal are more highly motivated when focusing on the smaller percentage of progress towards their goal, irrespective of whether this figure represents the actions already completed or those still remaining. Consistent with the authors’ theoretical predictions, the study finds empirical evidence for the small-area effect and its activating power, translated here into increased online user contributions. Besides contributing to the literature with an empirical study anchored in theory, the findings have direct practical implications for designers of online virtual reward systems by suggesting more effective (and motivating) ways of framing user progress towards virtual rewards.

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Notes

  1. With an additional study in the lab (Koo and Fishbach 2012) rule out “the possibility that attention to remaining actions solely drives the small-area effect.” This study is not performed in a real-life context (e.g., coffee shop) but uses lexical and numerical tasks.

  2. Undercontribution is a common problem in online communities – even if the community would be classified as being highly successful (Kraut and Resnick 2011). An overview about how to encourage contribution to online communities can be found in Kraut and Resnick (2011).

  3. There are further activities which play only a very minor role and account for less than 1 % of the total accumulated status points (e.g., inviting new members to the platform or following other users).

  4. It is noteworthy that the badge systems as well as the framing towards goal achievement on the analyzed as well as other popular platforms (such as Stack Overflow) has not changed much since then – underscoring that our work and its implications are still valid.

  5. Please note that our ‘control group’ is not a control group in the strict sense of the term, given that both groups receive the treatment. However, as their treatment differs in terms of level of intensity, we consider the users who after the event are in Interval 2 or 3 as a control group. This helps us present our analysis in a differences-in-differences framework.

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Acknowledgments

We thank participants of the Conference on Information Systems and Technology 2014 and the European Conference on Information System 2015 for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chair for Business Information Systems, esp. Digital Markets, Department of Business Information Systems, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, University of Paderborn, Warburger Str. 100, 33098, Paderborn, Germany

    Dennis Kundisch

  2. Polynomics AG, Baslerstrasse 44, 4600, Olten, Switzerland

    Tobias von Rechenberg

Authors
  1. Dennis Kundisch
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  2. Tobias von Rechenberg
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Correspondence to Dennis Kundisch.

Additional information

Accepted after two revisions by Prof. Dr. Bichler.

This paper is an extended version of Mutter and Kundisch (2015).

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Kundisch, D., von Rechenberg, T. Does the Framing of Progress Towards Virtual Rewards Matter?. Bus Inf Syst Eng 59, 207–222 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-016-0441-5

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