Dissertation - Social Structure and Mechanisms of Collective Production:Evidence from Wikipedia
Description
Andreea's dissertation research examines social networks in the setting of collective production, defined as collective action oriented towards production of collective goods - goods available for consumption by all members of a group whenever they are made available for consumption by any one of them. Collective production encompasses a wide variety of collective action types such as neighborhood improvement projects, cultural production, and creation of free online information and software. In organizational settings, collective production includes collective forms of creativity, knowledge creation, process innovation, scientific collaboration, or other activities through which employees produce collective goods such as infrastructure for advice-giving or information-sharing.
In her dissertation Andreea identifies three core risks of failure in collective production, and demonstrates the existence of three mechanisms through which social structure counterintuitively alleviates the risk that collective production fails to retain contributors or respond to demand for collective goods. These core risks are: failing to produce the most demanded goods in absence aggregate information such as pricing; high turnover caused by disrespect for collaboration norms; and high turnover caused by low embeddedness of participants in the peer network as opposed to other (non-peer) network structures.
In three papers she identifies three social mechanisms which counterintuitively In three papers she identifies three social mechanisms which counterintuitively alleviate these problems. The first study (currently under review at a top sociology journal), based on a unique longitudinal dataset of article editing and reading from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, shows that consumer contributions are necessary because they act a signal of social need to producers who are then able to improve the goods. In the second study, (currently under second-round review at a top-sociology journal) Andreea and her co-author Mikolaj Jan Piskorski examine network density, social norm infringement and enforcement, and participation, and show that norm infringement is not completely detrimental to participation, because subsequent enforcement results in increased likelihood that the beneficiary will participate again. These results rely on a large longitudinal dataset of participation networks and norm-related behavior in the English Wikipedia. In the third paper, based on extensive interviews with experienced Wikipedia contributors, she proposes that individuals who are involved in collaborative work but have strong outside commitments are more likely to remain involved than participants who forge personal ties with other contributors at the expense of other social commitments.