Show me the incentives: A dynamic structural model of employee blogging behavior

Abstract

Many firms believe that enterprise blogging forums can be used to help build the structured platform required for an environment that supports emergent innovation. While some employees tend to be 'consumers' of content created by others, some others contribute by acting as 'creators'. In this paper, we build and estimate a dynamic structural model towards understanding the mechanisms that incentivize users to contribute to blog forums that are consumed by employees across the organization. We find strong evidence of competitive dynamics in our enterprise wide data setting. Our results demonstrate why employees contribute to blog forums. We find that employees derive higher utility from readership of their work related posts than their leisurerelated posts. Employees compete with their peers to attract more readerships for their posts. Further, results indicate positive spillover effect from readership of leisure posts to work posts of a employee. We also find that knowledge-based benefits are higher for work related knowledge than leisure related knowledge. Our results suggest that enterprises would benefit more from feedback systems that provide a picture of how knowledge workers in the organization are interacting with the tools are made available to them. We discuss implications for implementing feedback systems that quantify the reputation of the content creator and incentivize employees to engage in this practice.

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