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18 - Social Computing: Answer vs. Vote

from Part III - Sequential Decision-Making

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2021

Yan Chen
Affiliation:
University of Science and Technology of China
Chih-Yu Wang
Affiliation:
Academica Sinica, Taipei
Chunxiao Jiang
Affiliation:
Tsinghua University, Beijing
K. J. Ray Liu
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Summary

In many social computing systems, users decide sequentially whether to participate or not and, if they participate, whether to create a piece of content directly (i.e. answering) or to rate existing content contributed by previous users (i.e. voting). We present in this chapter a game-theoretic model that formulates the sequential decision-making of strategic users under the presence of this answering–voting externality. We prove theoretically the existence and uniqueness of a pure strategy equilibrium. We show that there exist advantages for users with higher abilities and for answering earlier. Therefore, the equilibrium exhibits a threshold structure and the threshold for answering gradually increases as answers accumulate. To show the validness of the game-theoretic model, we analyze user behavior data collected from a popular question-and-answer site Stack Overflow and show that the main qualitative predictions of the game-theoretic model match up with observations made from the data. Finally, we formulate the system designer’s problem and abstract several design principles that could potentially guide the design of incentive mechanisms for social computing systems in practice.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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