Not Good Enough, But Try Again! Mitigating the Impact of Rejections on New Contributor Retention in Open Knowledge Collaboration
by
Aleksi Aaltonen
Assistant Professor
Department of Management Information Systems
Fox School of Business
Temple University
Friday, Feb 11
11:00 am – 12:30 pm
In-person: 1810 Liacouras Walk 420
Abstract:
Maintaining the quality of content in an open knowledge collaboration system such as a wiki, an open source software development project or a community question answering (CQA) service presents a unique dilemma. Quality control often requires rejecting contributions from new contributors who are not familiar with the rules and expectations of the system. However, an initial rejection can demotivate newcomers from attempting further contributions and, consequently, diminish the system’s capacity to maintain its contributor base. We posit rejection mechanism as a characteristic form of control in open knowledge collaboration and show that the way in which rejections are served moderates their impact on the retention of new contributors. We leverage a policy change to the rejection notices of a popular CQA service Stack Overflow using a regression discontinuity design to estimate the average treatment effect of the change on the retention of new contributors. The results show that an improved way to serve rejections increases the retention of initially rejected contributors by 22.4 percentage points. The effect of newly worded rejection notices on quality is neutral which may, however, conceal the operation of countervailing mechanisms. The results indicate that an open knowledge collaboration system must carefully design its rejection mechanism to balance between contributor retention and the quality of contributions, and suggest further opportunities for the study of rejections.