Designing Effective Performance Feedback Notification Systems to Stimulate Content Contribution: Evidence from a Crowdsourcing Recipe Platform

This study investigates whether and how a platform’s provision of performance feedback to users about their prior content contributions can help to stimulate users’ subsequent contributions. We draw on social value orientation theory to hypothesize how different framings may impact users’ likelihood of producing additional content. We partnered with a major mobile crowdsourcing recipe platform based in China to conduct a randomized field experiment involving the delivery of feedback messages with randomly determined framings, via mobile push notifications. We find that feedback framed either pro-socially or pro-self has a positive effect on content contributions, whereas feedback framed competitively has no such effect. Additionally, we observe differences across genders, such that the positive effects of pro-socially framed feedback are significantly stronger for female users. In contrast, competitively framed feedback is only effective for male users. Our findings provide implications for the design of platform-provided performance feedback to stimulate users\u27 content contribution

Role of Communication in Online Platforms

Online labor markets facilitate matching of workers and employers in a borderless virtual environment. Much of the attraction of these markets for employers derives from access to a large, geographically dispersed pool of workers. However, recent literature highlights that these markets are subject to issues such as employer biases against hiring distant workers and against new workers who lack reputation information. We examine the often-ignored role of pre-contract communication between workers and employers (via the platform-hosted private messaging system), which holds the potential to enhance workers\u27 probability of being hired while mitigating these biases. Based on private messaging activities between workers and employers from nearly half a million job applications on Freelancer.com, we quantify the causal impact on hiring outcomes from workers\u27 outreach to employers via private messaging, in addition to exploring the effects of message content. We find that initiating private messaging with a potential employer lifts a worker\u27s probability of being hired by roughly 29% over baseline. Moreover, these beneficial effects are amplified when workers reside at a distance, lack reputation, or bear negative reputation, demonstrating that private messaging can in fact attenuate the aforementioned hiring biases. The effects are also magnified when employers lack platform hiring experience, likely because such employers bear higher uncertainty and are more risk-averse