Linfeng visited SUFE to give a talk on his job market paper “Crowdsourcing Digital Public Goods | A Field Experiment on Metadata Contributions”. He interviewed for School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence though I think he is more of an economist.
Abstract
This study explores why people choose to contribute metadata, which is data about data. Using a field experiment conducted with more than 3,000 authors of AEA journal articles, our control message reduces the uncertainty about the future value of metadata, whereas those from the treatment conditions additionally make the private or social benefits of metadata salient. Surprisingly, we find that participants in the control condition provide significantly more metadata compared to those in the treatments. This suggests that simply knowing that metadata will have value is sufficient to motivate people to contribute. Our results also highlight the importance of interface design in online field experiments.
The paper invited authors to contribute to metadata of their papers (e.g. keywords classification) by sending out email, and studies the variation of such email content and its effect on participation rate.
the email highlight different benefit of contributing to meta data. though i think every person has their own opinion on this.
One difficulty of the study is that coauthor networks are contagious—so that treatment would have spillover effect particularly when users forward their email. The problem is solved by nice design of sampling on the coauthor network graph to isolate components where treatments and control can be safely applied without spillovers.
reference
Li, Linfeng and Chen, Yan and Levenstein, Margaret C. and Vilhuber, Lars, Crowdsourcing Digital Public Goods: A Field Experiment on Metadata Contributions (November 03, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5008203 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5008203