The Impact of Membership Overlap on the Survival of Online Communities

Online communities play an important role in society. In this paper, we study the effects of membership overlap on the survival of online communities. By analyzing the historical data of 5673 Wikia communities, we find that higher levels of membership overlap are positively associated with greater survival rate of online communities. Furthermore, we find that it is beneficial for new communities to have shared members who play a central role in other mature communities. These findings provide new insight into an important mechanism underlying successful online communities, contribute to theories of organization science, and provide several actionable steps for the hosts and creators of online communities

Life in the "Matrix": Human Mobility Patterns in the Cyber Space

With the wide adoption of the multi-community setting in many popular social media platforms, the increasing user engagements across multiple online communities warrant research attention. In this paper, we introduce a novel analogy between the movements in the cyber space and the physical space. This analogy implies a new way of studying human online activities by modelling the activities across online communities in a similar fashion as the movements among locations. First, we quantitatively validate the analogy by comparing several important properties of human online activities and physical movements. Our experiments reveal striking similarities between the cyber space and the physical space. Next, inspired by the established methodology on human mobility in the physical space, we propose a framework to study human "mobility" across online platforms. We discover three interesting patterns of user engagements in online communities. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that people with different mobility patterns also exhibit divergent preferences to online communities. This work not only attempts to achieve a better understanding of human online activities, but also intends to open a promising research direction with rich implications and applications.Comment: To appear at The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 201

The Size Conundrum: Why Online Knowledge Markets Can Fail at Scale

In this paper, we interpret the community question answering websites on the StackExchange platform as knowledge markets, and analyze how and why these markets can fail at scale. A knowledge market framing allows site operators to reason about market failures, and to design policies to prevent them. Our goal is to provide insights on large-scale knowledge market failures through an interpretable model. We explore a set of interpretable economic production models on a large empirical dataset to analyze the dynamics of content generation in knowledge markets. Amongst these, the Cobb-Douglas model best explains empirical data and provides an intuitive explanation for content generation through concepts of elasticity and diminishing returns. Content generation depends on user participation and also on how specific types of content (e.g. answers) depends on other types (e.g. questions). We show that these factors of content generation have constant elasticity---a percentage increase in any of the inputs leads to a constant percentage increase in the output. Furthermore, markets exhibit diminishing returns---the marginal output decreases as the input is incrementally increased. Knowledge markets also vary on their returns to scale---the increase in output resulting from a proportionate increase in all inputs. Importantly, many knowledge markets exhibit diseconomies of scale---measures of market health (e.g., the percentage of questions with an accepted answer) decrease as a function of number of participants. The implications of our work are two-fold: site operators ought to design incentives as a function of system size (number of participants); the market lens should shed insight into complex dependencies amongst different content types and participant actions in general social networks.Comment: The 27th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 201

Are All Successful Communities Alike? Characterizing and Predicting the Success of Online Communities

The proliferation of online communities has created exciting opportunities to study the mechanisms that explain group success. While a growing body of research investigates community success through a single measure -- typically, the number of members -- we argue that there are multiple ways of measuring success. Here, we present a systematic study to understand the relations between these success definitions and test how well they can be predicted based on community properties and behaviors from the earliest period of a community's lifetime. We identify four success measures that are desirable for most communities: (i) growth in the number of members; (ii) retention of members; (iii) long term survival of the community; and (iv) volume of activities within the community. Surprisingly, we find that our measures do not exhibit very high correlations, suggesting that they capture different types of success. Additionally, we find that different success measures are predicted by different attributes of online communities, suggesting that success can be achieved through different behaviors. Our work sheds light on the basic understanding of what success represents in online communities and what predicts it. Our results suggest that success is multi-faceted and cannot be measured nor predicted by a single measurement. This insight has practical implications for the creation of new online communities and the design of platforms that facilitate such communities.Comment: To appear at The Web Conference 201

The Mystique of Customers’ Saturation in Online Brand Communities

Most research studies in the area of online brand communities have largely studied the positive aspects of online brand communities, ignoring the negative influences, mainly the growing threat from customers’ saturation within these communities. Given the lack of understanding on the concept of customer saturation in online brand communities, this study establishes the necessary early understanding on this important concept by combining various streams of marketing and brand literature as well as information system. This study enhances understanding through the development of five propositions focusing on the role of customers’ saturation on (1) customers’ experience within online brand communities, (2) brand relationship, and (3) the co‐creation of value. The discussion and review of the current literature produces five important propositions. The propositions develop the direction that customer saturation in online brand communities is likely to impact three key areas

The Mystique of Customers’ Saturation Behaviour in Online Brand Communities

No time in the history, consumption is considered to be as important as in today's world. It defines who we are, how well/perfect we perform our multiroles within the society (buying the most expensive clothes means being the best mom for instances), what symbolic meanings we attribute to our belongings, and how rich/clever/fashion conscious or innovative we are. Due to multidisciplinary and multimethod character of the concept of consumer behavior, it is appropriate to study it accordingly in order to understand the subject with its different aspects and holistically. Especially with the cultural, social, and technological changes within today's world, this issue becomes prominent. This book is a modest try for that end

Technology standards and performance: the impact of social network service integration and open technology standards

For at least hundreds of years, if not longer, industries have been regularly transformed by the adoption of standards. Early examples from the early nineteenth century include the standardization of railroad track gauges and the introduction of interchangeable parts in the production of munitions. With the advent of the modern technology era, the introduction of standards has continued to transform industries that are now information technology driven. However, despite the broad consequences the introduction of standards presents, there remains a limited understanding of them. In this work we begin to build upon our understanding of the impact of standards by conducting a study on each of two distinct industries that have significant implications for society. The first industry considered is online services, focusing on an increasingly dominant subset that contains online communities. This industry is being transformed by the introduction of de facto standards for user profile management through social network service integration. The second industry studied is the defense avionics industry. This industry is positioned to potentially be transformed by the introduction of an open technology standard for software development. In the first study we investigate the impact of an increasingly common but understudied design option available to online communities: whether to integrate with a social network platform such as Facebook or Google+. Social network platform integration may provide several benefits to an online community, including creating more social interaction opportunities for members and helping members share personal information with each other to facilitate the creation of social bonds. Theory suggests that both of these factors (opportunities for interaction and disclosure of personal data) enhance the success of bond-based online communities, i.e., those in which member attachment to the community is driven by social bonds with other members. However, some elements of the theory have not been tested, and the theory does not consider the possibility that interaction opportunities and the disclosure of personal information might harm the online community by creating information privacy concerns among users. To address this gap, we tested the effect of implementing the “Login with Facebook” feature on new member registration and member social bond formation in an online virtual world community. Using a randomized field experiment as well as archival data analysis, we found that Facebook integration led to lower registration and lower social bond formation. I.e., it had a consistently negative effect on the online community. In addition to contributing to theory about the design of online communities, our results are also of practical interest to managers of online communities who have implemented or are planning to implement social network platform integration as well as to social network platforms who would like for their integration services to be more widely adopted. In the second study we examine the impact of introducing an open technology standard to the U.S. Defense Avionics industry. U.S. Defense Avionics is a multi-billion dollar industry featuring a monopoly buyer and pseudo-monopoly sellers, and its interplay of regulation and competition have traditionally favored secrecy and proprietary design as companies vie for huge multi-year contracts in a feast or famine market. Recognizing this, the U.S. government launched an initiative to develop an open technology standard jointly with industry, with the intention of using these standards to leverage the anticipated competition and efficiency benefits. Using a combination of interviews and a Delphi study, we examine the impact of this standard on software project effort across key industry firm archetypes. We find that experts anticipate a significant premium in the short term that transitions to cost reduction in the long term, with these expectations varying by firm type. This work contributes to the literature on open standards and learning by validating and quantifying the effect, and provides unique insights into U.S. Defense Avionics industry. This study also informs both expert and industry expectations as well as provides a best estimate of the actual impacts of adopting the standard.Ph.D

Information Exchange and Multiple Peer Groups: A Natural Experiment in an Online Community

We utilise a quasi-experimental setup to identify causal effects of having additional peer groups on information exchange in a large online maternity community. The information exchange is a key performance indicator for the community as well as a public good among users. Pregnant users join default peer groups based on estimated due date (EDD). Natural uncertainties of EDD can lead to multiple peer groups. Using EDD as an instrumental variable, we find that additional peer group(s) reduces information exchange in both default peer group and total peer groups. Having more advanced groups mitigates the reduction, likely due to information spillovers