TY - GEN
T1 - A game theoretic analysis of collaboration in Wikipedia
AU - Anand, S.
AU - Arazy, Ofer
AU - Mandayam, Narayan B.
AU - Nov, Oded
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Peer production projects such as Wikipedia or open-source software development allow volunteers to collectively create knowledge-based products. The inclusive nature of such projects poses difficult challenges for ensuring trustworthiness and combating vandalism. Prior studies in the area deal with descriptive aspects of peer production, failing to capture the idea that while contributors collaborate, they also compete for status in the community and for imposing their views on the product. In this paper, we investigate collaborative authoring in Wikipedia, where contributors append and overwrite previous contributions to a page. We assume that a contributor's goal is to maximize ownership of content sections, such that content owned (i.e. originated) by her survived the most recent revision of the page.We model contributors' interactions to increase their content ownership as a non-cooperative game, where a player's utility is associated with content owned and cost is a function of effort expended. Our results capture several real-life aspects of contributors interactions within peer-production projects. Namely, we show that at the Nash equilibrium there is an inverse relationship between the effort required to make a contribution and the survival of a contributor's content. In other words, majority of the content that survives is necessarily contributed by experts who expend relatively less effort than non-experts. An empirical analysis of Wikipedia articles provides support for our model's predictions. Implications for research and practice are discussed in the context of trustworthy collaboration as well as vandalism.
AB - Peer production projects such as Wikipedia or open-source software development allow volunteers to collectively create knowledge-based products. The inclusive nature of such projects poses difficult challenges for ensuring trustworthiness and combating vandalism. Prior studies in the area deal with descriptive aspects of peer production, failing to capture the idea that while contributors collaborate, they also compete for status in the community and for imposing their views on the product. In this paper, we investigate collaborative authoring in Wikipedia, where contributors append and overwrite previous contributions to a page. We assume that a contributor's goal is to maximize ownership of content sections, such that content owned (i.e. originated) by her survived the most recent revision of the page.We model contributors' interactions to increase their content ownership as a non-cooperative game, where a player's utility is associated with content owned and cost is a function of effort expended. Our results capture several real-life aspects of contributors interactions within peer-production projects. Namely, we show that at the Nash equilibrium there is an inverse relationship between the effort required to make a contribution and the survival of a contributor's content. In other words, majority of the content that survives is necessarily contributed by experts who expend relatively less effort than non-experts. An empirical analysis of Wikipedia articles provides support for our model's predictions. Implications for research and practice are discussed in the context of trustworthy collaboration as well as vandalism.
KW - Collaboration
KW - Non-cooperative game
KW - Peer production
KW - Trustworthy collaboration
KW - Vandalism
KW - Wikipedia
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84893352907&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84893352907&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-02786-9_3
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-02786-9_3
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84893352907
SN - 9783319027852
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 29
EP - 44
BT - Decision and Game Theory for Security - 4th International Conference, GameSec 2013, Proceedings
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 4th International Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security, GameSec 2013
Y2 - 11 November 2013 through 12 November 2013
ER -