Tobias Assmann, one of the students in the 2006 UC Berkeley course on Participatory Media/Collective action I taught with Xiao Qiang, considered the question of incentives for peer production as his class project, and did such a splendid job that I recommend it to our readers. My student’s project reminded me of something Marc Davis had pointed out to me a week ago — that Google Answers, which paid people to answer other people’s questions, is out of business, but Yahoo Answers, which pays only in non-monetary points, had millions of users:

As I am very interested in motivations for contributions to online communities, I thought I wanted to cover this in more detail. I will start off with the discussion in the blogosphere whether community sites should pay their top members for contributions. Since bloggers are the frontier of contributions to the wider internet community, I follow up with a summary of the specific problem they have, when accepting payments for their contributions: loosing their independence. Since payment for contributions is handled differently at different sites I go on with an overview of their payment schemes. Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation. Since that is an issue widely discussed in the academic world, I will present some interesting examples of an effect occurring in this context. In all of these examples, a very interesting effect occurs, which social sciences summarize in their so called “Crowding Theory”. The following section introduces this theory and concludes with implications for the management of an online community.