Motivating user engagement in online health Q&A communities: do contingent financial incentives matter?

User engagement is critical for online health Q&A communities. Financial incentives, which vary across different communities and reward schemes, are expected to motivate such contribution behaviors. Even though financial incentives have been extensively examined in prior studies, the impact of newly designed contingent financial incentives of a new pay-for-answer reward scheme has not been empirically examined in any online health Q&A community. Given this research gap, our study aims to perform an exploratory investigation of the effects of contingent financial incentives on user engagement in terms of knowledge contribution and social interactions.

Based on expectancy-value theory and equity theory, a research model was developed to reflect the influences of contingent financial incentives on user engagement. A unique dataset was gathered from a large online health Q&A community utilizing this contingent financial incentive reward structure, and the Heckman selection model was applied using a two-step procedure to test these hypotheses. Possible endogeneity issues were also addressed in the robustness check.

Our results demonstrate that the effect of contingent financial incentives on answer quantity and quality is quadratic. Additionally, our study reveals that this contingent financial incentive enhances both comment and emotional interactions among users.

Our study enriches the literature on financial incentives, knowledge contribution and user engagement by revealing the nuanced effects of financial incentives within a novel pay-for-answer scheme. This study also offers significant implications for practitioners involved in online community incentive design.