Effect of Visible Meta-Rewards on Consumer Generated Media

Abstract

Consumer Generated Media(CGM) are useful for sharing information, but information does not come without cost. Incentives to discourage free riding (receiving information, but not providing it) are therefore offered to CGM users. The public goods game framework is a strong tool for analyzing and understanding CGM and users' information behaviors. Although it is well known that rewards are needed for maintaining cooperation in CGM, the existing models hypothesize the linkage hypothesis which is unnatural. In this study, we update the meta-reward model to identify a realistic situation through which to achieve a cooperation on CGM. Our model reveals that restricted public goods games cannot provide cooperative regimes when players are myopic and never have any strategies on their actions. Cooperative regimes emerge if players that provide rst-order rewards know whether cooperative players will give second-order rewards to the rst-order rewarders. In the context of CGM, active posting of articles occurs if potential commenters/responders can ascertain that the user posting the article will respond to their comments.