59 research outputs found
Group Size and Incentive to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia
The literature of private provision of public goods suggests that
incentive to contribute is inversely related to group size. This paper
empirically tests this relationship using field data from Chinese
Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We exploit an exogenous reduction in
group size as a result of the blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China
and examine whether individual contributions increase after the block as
predicted in the literature. Our result indicates the opposite:
individual contribution of unaffected contributors decreases by 42% on
average as a result of the block. We attribute the cause to social
effects: contributors care about the number of beneficiaries of their
contributions. We build a simple model to illustrate how social effects
and group size affect individual incentive to contribute. Consistent
with our model prediction, we find that the more a contributor values
social recognition, the greater the reduction in her contributions after
the block. A series of robustness checks appear to support our explanation
Strategies to Fight Ad-sponsored Rivals
We analyze the optimal strategy of a high-quality incumbent that faces a
low-quality ad-sponsored competitor. In addition to competing through
adjustments of tactical variables such as price or advertising
intensity, we allow the incumbent to consider changes in its business
model. We consider four alternative business models, two pure models
(subscription-based and ad-sponsored) and two mixed models that are
hybrids of the two pure models. We show that the optimal response to an
ad-sponsored rival often entails business model reconfigurations, a
phenomenon that we dub 'competing through business models.' We also find
that when there is an ad-sponsored entrant, the incumbent is more likely
to prefer to compete through a pure, rather than a mixed, business model
because of cannibalization and endogenous vertical differentiation
concerns. We discuss how our study helps improve our understanding of
notions of strategy, business model, and tactics in the field of strategy
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