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Externalities in knowledge production: evidence from a randomized field experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Marit Hinnosaar ,
Toomas Hinnosaar Open the ORCID record for Toomas Hinnosaar [Opens in a new window] ,
Michael E. Kummer  and
Olga Slivko
Marit Hinnosaar*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin, Italy CEPR, London, UK
Toomas Hinnosaar*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK CEPR, London, UK
Michael E. Kummer*
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA ZEW, Mannheim, Germany
Olga Slivko*
Affiliation:
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
*
marit.hinnosaar@gmail.com
toomas@hinnosaar.net
M.Kummer@uea.ac.uk
slivko@rsm.nl
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Abstract

Are there positive or negative externalities in knowledge production? We analyze whether current contributions to knowledge production increase or decrease the future growth of knowledge. To assess this, we use a randomized field experiment that added content to some pages in Wikipedia while leaving similar pages unchanged. We compare subsequent content growth over the next 4 years between the treatment and control groups. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 4-year growth of content length larger than twelve percent. We can also rule out effects on 4-year growth of content quality larger than four points, which is less than one-fifth of the size of the treatment itself. The treatment increased editing activity in the first 2 years, but most of these edits only modified the text added by the treatment. Our results have implications for information seeding and incentivizing contributions. They imply that additional content may inspire future contributions in the short- and medium-term but do not generate large externalities in the long term.

Keywords

Knowledge accumulationUser-generated contentWikipediaPublic goods provisionField experimentL17L86C93

Information

Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 706 - 733
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-021-09730-x.

Data and code for this article are available in Hinnosaar et al. (2021a), Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/T4VFCX.

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