A Big Thinkers Event: Getting the Good Stuff In, Keeping the Bad Stuff Out - Incentives and User-contributed Content

Abstract
User-contributed content as an input to the production of information services or goods is not new, but it is growing rapidly in significance. Open-source software, Wikipedia, and Flickr are but a few examples: there are a surprising variety of information products and services now relying on user-contributed content. I propose an economic characterization of user-contributed content, and identify contributor behavior issues critical for success. For an information service provider, these issues predict underprovision of content, inefficient mixes of quality and variety, and undesirable levels of content pollution. How might we design information services or systems to ameliorate these problems? Given the centrality of autonomous, motivated human behavior in user-contributed content problems, I argue this is a problem for incentive-centered design: how to configure economic, social and psychological incentives to induce contribution, discourage pollution, and motivate sufficient effort to generate quality? To illustrate, for a content pollution problem loosely based on a popular Web site's experience, I offer a stylized mechanism that relies on user-contributed (meta)content to screen out polluting contributions.

About Jeffrey MacKie-Mason
Jeffrey MacKie-Mason is the Arthur W. Burks Professor of Information and Computer Science, and a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He is also the founding Director of STIET (a research program for Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions) at Michigan.

His work is a mix of mostly economics with some computer science, addressing principles of design and performance for information technologies and digital information content. Recently he started to focus on incentive-centered design -- design of information systems and services that takes into account the behavior of autonomous, motivated and often strategic humans. He also does a fair bit of work on competition policy and antitrust, especially for technology-related industries. He was an early 1990s pioneer in the economics of the Internet.

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