Re-examining price as a predictor of answer quality in an online q&a site

Authors:
Grace YoungJoo Jeon;Yong-Mi Kim;Yan Chen
Affiliations:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA;University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA;University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Online question-answering services provide mechanisms for knowledge exchange by allowing users to ask and answer questions on a wide range of topics. A key question for designing such services is whether charging a price has an effect on answer quality. Two field experiments using one such service, Google Answers, offer conflicting answers to this question. To resolve this inconsistency, we re-analyze data from Harper et al. [5] and Chen et al. [2] to study the price effect in greater depth. Decomposing the price effect into two different levels yields results that reconcile those of the two field experiments. Specifically, we find that: (1) a higher price significantly increases the likelihood that a question receives an answer and (2) for questions that receive an answer, there is no significant price effect on answer quality. Additionally, we find that the rater background makes a difference in evaluating answer quality.