INFORMATION AS A PUBLIC GOOD
AND USER-GENERATED CONTENT
I203 Social and Organizational Issues of Information
Administrative Fun

Reminder: Assn1 due on Thursday
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Thoughts on response papers
2
Agenda
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


Overview of Exchange Processes
Conceptualizing Information as the object
of exchange; user-generated information
goods
Basic economics of information goods
Contributing information and the problem
of sharing information goods
3
Direct Exchange
4
4
Forms of Direct Social Exchange
 Reciprocal
 Negotiated
A
B
A
B
3rd Party Assurance
5
Indirect Exchange
6
Indirect Exchange: Generalized
Exchange and Gift Economies
Collective/Public
Good
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What are public goods?
Public Good

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)
8
Non-Excludability and the ‘free-rider’
problem
 Non-excludability
creates the freerider problem
 Yet,
If free-riding is
rampant the
collective good will
not be produced
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Game Theory approach to public goods: the
basic “prisoner’s dilemma” framework
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Person 1
(Cooperate)
Person 2
(Cooperate)
Person 2
(Defect)
Person 1
(Defect)
Win
Win
Win
Lose
Lose
Win
Lose
Lose
In a n-person collective
action problem, we can
think of “player 2” as ‘n’ #
of participants
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Discretionary Databases as Public Good?
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See: Connolly and Thorn 1990;
Markus, 1990
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Information Goods are Public Goods (Kollock
1999, Shapiro and Varian 1999, Cheshire 2005)


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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
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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
(especially relative to use
value)
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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 significant impact on
the production function
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Problem of Social Loafing

Social Loafing: Phenomenon
whereby individuals exert less
effort on a collective task than
they do on a comparable
individual task.
 Across
a range of settings, people
contribute less than the optimal
amount to public goods and
consume more than their ‘fair’
share of common pool resources
(see Beenan et al 2004)
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Social Psychological Benefits?


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):
 Sense of efficacy (making an impact;
belief that we will succeed)
 Anticipation of reciprocity
 Effect on personal reputation
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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
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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

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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
Why “free-riding” is not necessarily a
bad thing (Rafaeli and Raban)
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• 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.
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Rafaeli and Raban (continued)
• 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
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