Building Status in an Online Community

Abstract

We argue that the actions for which actors receive recognition vary as they move up the hierarchy. When actors first enter a community, the community rewards them for their easier-to-evaluate contributions to the community. Eventually, however, as these actors rise in status, further increases in stature come increasingly from engaging in actions that are more difficult to evaluate or even impossible to judge. These dynamics produce a positive feedback loop, in which those who have already been accorded some stature garner even greater status through quality-ambiguous actions. We present evidence from Stack Overflow, an online community, and from two online experiments consistent with these expected patterns. Funding: All authors would like to acknowledge funding from the Austrian Science Fund [Grant P 25768-G16]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.1559 .