Does Identity Disclosure Help or Hurt User Content Generation? Social Presence, Inhibition, and Displacement Effects

Abstract

How will disclosing users’ identities affect their content-generation activities? Will this identity-disclosure policy in one section also change users’ behaviors in the other section? We answer these questions by using a natural experiment where a large corporate online community chose to disclose users’ identities in one section (the focal section) but not the other (the neighbor section). Our analyses show that in the focal section, disclosing identity increases social presence and inhibits users’ willingness to generate content, resulting in greater effort spent per content but smaller content volume. Moreover, identity disclosure in the focal section has a strong displacement effect: users generate more pieces of content but decrease their effort per content in the neighbor section, where they remain anonymous. The intensity of these effects depends on users’ pursuit of volume- and effort-based image. For the managers of online communities, disclosing users’ identity information inevitably changes their content-generation activities, and the unintended displacement effect cannot be overlooked. Practitioners can adjust these effects by changing reward systems and how users earn image from content generation. Given that many websites rely on users’ voluntary content generation, the effects of relevant policies should be comprehensively evaluated.

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