Gro¨bner bases: a computational approach to commutative algebra
Gro¨bner bases: a computational approach to commutative algebra
FOCS '05 Proceedings of the 46th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
What is user engagement? A conceptual framework for defining user engagement with technology
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Feed me: motivating newcomer contribution in social network sites
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Policy teaching through reward function learning
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Incentivizing high-quality user-generated content
Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World wide web
Causal discovery in social media using quasi-experimental designs
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Media Analytics
Gamification. using game-design elements in non-gaming contexts
CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Optimal crowdsourcing contests
Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Plugged in to the community: social motivators in online goal-setting groups
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies
Finding red balloons with split contracts: robustness to individuals' selfishness
STOC '12 Proceedings of the forty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
Incentives, gamification, and game theory: an economic approach to badge design
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Geo-locating the knowledge transfer in StackOverflow
Proceedings of the 2013 International Workshop on Social Software Engineering
Trust, but verify: predicting contribution quality for knowledge base construction and curation
Proceedings of the 7th ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
Quizz: targeted crowdsourcing with a billion (potential) users
Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web
Engaging with massive online courses
Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web
Perceived and Actual Role of Gamification Principles
UCC '13 Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM 6th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing
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An increasingly common feature of online communities and social media sites is a mechanism for rewarding user achievements based on a system of badges. Badges are given to users for particular contributions to a site, such as performing a certain number of actions of a given type. They have been employed in many domains, including news sites like the Huffington Post, educational sites like Khan Academy, and knowledge-creation sites like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow. At the most basic level, badges serve as a summary of a user's key accomplishments; however, experience with these sites also shows that users will put in non-trivial amounts of work to achieve particular badges, and as such, badges can act as powerful incentives. Thus far, however, the incentive structures created by badges have not been well understood, making it difficult to deploy badges with an eye toward the incentives they are likely to create. In this paper, we study how badges can influence and steer user behavior on a site---leading both to increased participation and to changes in the mix of activities a user pursues on the site. We introduce a formal model for reasoning about user behavior in the presence of badges, and in particular for analyzing the ways in which badges can steer users to change their behavior. To evaluate the main predictions of our model, we study the use of badges and their effects on the widely used Stack Overflow question-answering site, and find evidence that their badges steer behavior in ways closely consistent with the predictions of our model. Finally, we investigate the problem of how to optimally place badges in order to induce particular user behaviors. Several robust design principles emerge from our framework that could potentially aid in the design of incentives for a broad range of sites.