Analyzing Payment Based Question and Answering Service.

Community based question answering (CQA) services receive a large volume of questions today. It is increasingly challenging to motivate domain experts to give timely answers. Recently, payment-based CQA services explore new incentive models to engage real-world experts and celebrities by allowing them to set a price on their answers. In this paper, we perform a data-driven analysis on Fenda, a payment-based CQA service that has gained initial success with this incentive model. Using a large dataset of 220K paid questions (worth 1 million USD) over two months, we examine how monetary incentives affect different players in the system and their over-time engagement. Our study reveals several key findings: while monetary incentive enables quick answers from experts, it also drives certain users to aggressively game the systems for profits. In addition, this incentive model turns CQA service into a supplier-driven marketplace where users need to proactively adjust their price as needed. We find famous people are unwilling to lower their price, which in turn hurts their income and engagement-level over time. Based on our results, we discuss the implications to future payment-based CQA design.