Designing target-oriented incentive systems for online production communities

Online production communities aim to realize the collective intelligence and leverage the potential creativity, manpower, and knowledge of volunteer users to generate high quality, public content. Introducing appropriate incentives to sustain participation is not a trivial task for community designers due to the dynamic and multi-dimensional nature of such communities. In this paper, we review and synthesize the existing body of research pertaining to user participation and incentive systems and propose a novel approach towards incentive systems based on user desires and lifecycle-based community objectives. The identified relevant user desires drawn from Reiss's theory of basic desires are self-importance, self-development, fun, vindication, socialization, group identity and uniqueness. By using this desire-based approach, we conceptualize a generalizable and target-oriented iterative design model for developing and adapting incentive systems. The theorized model extends the current body of research by accumulating and merging the academic findings from different types of communities into a unified prescriptive model. This model also provides a practical guide for community designers to follow a systematic approach towards designing effective incentive systems.