Whether talking about the office kitchen, hiking trails or ratings on Yelp, there are always people who put in effort to leave those spaces better. There are also those who contribute nothing to that public good.
New research using large-scale online experiments suggests that rewarding people to contribute to a virtual public good, such as a simulated online rating for a ferry system, increased the accuracy of the ratings and improved the overall quality of that resource.
The multidisciplinary team, including researchers from the University of California, Davis; Hunter College, College of New York; the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics; and Princeton University tested ideas about collective action in a simulation incorporating more than 500 people worldwide. Team expertise included communication science, sociology, computer science, psychology and animal behavior.
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