The Impact of Reputation Systems on Peer Feedback in Social Media

Understanding how opinions are received and evaluated is important for an online community because the volume and quality of user opinions are key determinants of success. In this paper, we investigate how a reputation system affects peer evaluations in an online community. In contrast to previous research on reputation systems, which has predominantly shown that reputation systems can induce posting activity and quality contributions, we study how reputation markers (achievement badges, for example) may effect changes in peer evaluations. We rely on a unique and detailed data set and employ a difference-in-differences approach, combined with propensity score matching. The results suggest that, all else equal, posters receive disproportionately-higher evaluations of their posts after they earn a reputation marker, irrespective of post quality. This suggests a “rich-get-richer” process induced by a reputation system that may have the unintended effect of favoring some participants at the expense of equally or more highly skilled others