WHEN PAYING FOR REVIEWS PAYS OFF:THE CASE OF PERFORMANCE-CONTINGENTMONETARY REWARDS br

Several online review platforms offer monetary incentives to motivate individuals towrite reviews andkeepthem engagedwiththe platforms. While existing studies have examinedthe effects of completion-contingentmonetary incentives (which uniformly reward users as longas they write reviews on the platform), we knowlittle aboutthe effectiveness of performance-contingent monetary incentives (whichrewardplatform usersbasedonthe quality of their reviews). Inthis paper, we examine the effects of receivingperformance-contingent rewards onusers' continuedcontributioninterms of the quantity, quality,andvalence of thereviews they generate. We leverage aquasi-experiment researchdesign toanalyzealarge dataset that weobtainthrougha collaboration with a large restaurant review platform in Asia. Our evidence shows that after receiving performance-contingent rewards, individuals write more reviews and write reviews that are of better quality. Interestingly, receiving rewards does not significantly affect the valence of subsequent reviews. Our study extends past research by being one of the first to examine how receiving performance-contingent rewards affects subsequent behaviors of reviewers. Our results can also guide platform managers to design efficient and effective incentive policies