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Why pay?: exploring how financial incentives are used for question & answer

Published:10 April 2010Publication History

ABSTRACT

Electronic commerce has enabled a number of online pay-for-answer services. However, despite commercial interest, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how financial incentives support question asking and answering. Using 800 questions randomly selected from a pay-for-answer site, along with site usage statistics, we examined what factors impact askers' decisions to pay. We also explored how financial rewards affect answers, and if question pricing can help organize Q&A exchanges for archival purposes. We found that askers' decisions are two-part--whether or not to pay and how much to pay. Askers are more likely to pay when requesting facts and will pay more when questions are more difficult. On the answer side, our results support prior findings that paying more may elicit a higher number of answers and answers that are longer, but may not elicit higher quality answers (as rated by the askers). Finally, we present evidence that questions with higher rewards have higher archival value, which suggests that pricing can be used to support archival use.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2010
      2690 pages
      ISBN:9781605589299
      DOI:10.1145/1753326

      Copyright © 2010 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 10 April 2010

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