Authors
Bei Yan, Lian Jian
Publication date
2017
Journal
Computers in Human Behavior
Volume
76
Pages
9-18
Publisher
Elsevier
Description
Because new members are important sources of knowledge to online knowledge communities, it is important to retain them after their initial interactions with the community. With a large-scale behavioral dataset collected from a leading online Question and Answer community for programmers, Stack Overflow, we investigated how the community's knowledge responses and social responses to newcomers' questions affected their subsequent likelihood of knowledge contribution (answering others' questions) and knowledge seeking (asking more questions). Contrary to the theory of reciprocity, and in line with predictions by the bystander effect, we found that receiving high quality answers negatively influenced new knowledge seekers' future likelihood of knowledge contribution. Consistent with the social exchange theory, receiving high quality answers positively affected newcomers' future knowledge seeking …
Total citations
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