Information as a Public Good and User-Generated Content

Information as a Public Good and User-Generated Content I203 Social and Organizational Issues of Information

Administrative Fun • Reminder: Roundtables next Tuesday! • Reading distributed today for Thursday’s lecture (pdf will be posted to website today)

Agenda • Overview of Exchange Processes • Conceptualizing Information as the object of exchange; user-generated information goods • Contributing information and the problem of sharing information goods

Direct Exchange

A B A B 3rd Party Assurance Forms of Direct Social Exchange • Reciprocal • Negotiated

Indirect Exchange

Indirect Exchange: Generalized Exchange and Gift Economies Collective/Public Good

Public Good What are public goods? • Generally, goods that: • (1) when made available can be consumed by others at little (or perhaps no) marginal cost (non-rival goods or jointness of supply) and, • (2) are non-excludable. • Tragedy of the commons (Hardin 1968)

Non-Excludability and the ‘free-rider’ problem • Non-excludability creates the free-rider problem • If free-riding is rampant, the collective good will not be produced

Game Theory approach to public goods: the basic “prisoner’s dilemma” framework Person 1 (Cooperate) Person 1 (Defect) In a n-person collective action problem, we can think of “player 2” as ‘n’ # of participants Person 2 (Cooperate) Person 2 (Defect)

“I guess I will never vote again…unless of course no one else is voting.” – DeeptiChittamuru (fall 2007)

Information Goods are Public Goods (Kollock 1999, Shapiro and Varian 1999) • When distributed online, it is difficult to keep people from benefiting from information goods • Free-riding in such a context may be normative behavior– simply using the information provided by others. • Cost of contribution is a central to understanding the production of information goods

Economics of Information Goods • Some key features of many information goods: • Non-rival (high jointness of supply) • Replicability (varies; DRM vs. non-DRM) • Low cost of production (relative to use value)

If we are tempted to free-ride, then why are public information goods produced? • A single information good can be a public good • This has a huge impact on the production function • Some individuals are willing to contribute to a public good even when the costs appear to outweigh the benefits (i.e., Coleman 1988, Piliavin 1990, Simmons 1992, etc) • Altrusim, rational zealotry • Other motivations (Kollock 1999): • Anticipation of reciprocity • Effect on personal reputation • Sense of efficacy (making an impact)

Privileged Groups "The fact that many digital public goods can be provided by a single individual means that in these cases there are no coordination costs to bear and that there is no danger of being a sucker, in the sense of contributing to a good that requires the efforts of many, only to find that too few have contributed [...]” -Peter Kollock

Information Goods on the Internet: The Issue of Group Size • Generally, smaller groups tend to have a better chance of producing a public good (Olson 1965) • Why? • More benefits for each person • Larger impact of any single contribution • Generally, lower costs of organization

Why free-riding is not necessarily a bad thing (Rafaeli and Raban) • It is better for the group if many members free ride than if they contribute negatively (poor knowledge, unexamined sources, etc.). • Information sought tends to be unique. A free-rider on a substantial portion of exchanges may become an active contributor in a particular question. • Free-riders are virtually invisible in online systems and tend to be ignored. They are not perceived as free-riders. • Connectivity does not mean that everyone who is connected actually has information to contribute. Yet, these free-riders get a unique learning opportunity and can feel part of the community, generating community level positive effects

But what about VERY LARGE groups? World of Music David Gleich, Matt Rasmussen, Leonid Zhukov, and Kevin Lang http://www.stanford.edu/~dgleich/demos/worldofmusic/interact.html

Information as a Public Good and User-Generated Content