Essays on Membership and Participation in Online Communities Public
Jinna, Pranay (Spring 2019)
Abstract
My dissertation consists of two essays focusing on membership and participation in online communities. In my first essay titled “Attraction, Participation and Retention in Online Communities: An Ecological Overview”, I draw from theories of user participation and organizational ecology to explain how overlapping membership in online communities affects attraction, participation and long-term retention of members in these communities. I find that high membership overlap density has a negative effect on new member attraction but a surprising positive effect on long term retention of existing members. Sharing members with other communities increases long term retention of members. Further analysis at the individual level shows us that members in multiple communities are more likely to stay longer on the platform and hence also stay longer in each of the communities. I find that as multiple membership increases, members are more likely to increase their overall engagement on the platform but their engagement per community decreases. In my second paper titled “Bias in Online Reviews: Variety and Atypicality in Online Gaming”, I study self-selection biases in online reviews while accounting for review propensity of different segments of individuals. Segmenting individuals based on their variety seeking and atypicality seeking preferences, I find that poly-mixers - individuals with high variety seeking and atypicality seeking tendencies are less likely to review products but more likely to give lower ratings compared to other individuals. I find that an individual’s social network, the number of products owned and their product usage significantly impact their propensity to review and rate products.
Table of Contents
Essay 1: Attraction, Participation and Retention in Online Communities: An Ecological Perspective
1. Introduction
2. Theory and Hypotheses
2.1 Ecological View of Sustainability of Online Communities
2.2 Multiple Category Membership and Member Motivation for Contribution and Participation
3. Data
4. Methods
5. Results
6. Discussion
7. Figures
8. Tables
9. References
10. Appendix
Essay 2: Bias in Online Reviews: Variety and Atypicality in Online Gaming
1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
2.1 Categories and Category Spanning
2.2 Variety Seeking, Omnivorosness and Atypicality Seeking
2.3 Online Reviews
3. Hypotheses
4. Data
5. Calculating DistanceMeasures
5.1 Atypicality Measure for a Game
5.2 Variety Seeking Measure for an Individual
6. Variables
7. Estimation
8. Results
9. Discussion
10. Figures
11. Tables
12. References
13. Appendix
About this Dissertation
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