A Little Help from My Friends: How Receiving Assistance Affects Participation in Online Knowledge-Sharing Communities

Online knowledge-sharing communities are important arenas for the development and exchange of knowledge; both firm participation and sponsorship in communities are increasing, as is scholarly interest in understanding how interactions between members shape subsequent participation. We contribute to this literature by examining the relationship between two increasingly relevant, yet underexplored, sets of factors: we examine the effects of with whom an interaction occurs (a user or an employee) on two types of participatory outcomes (future asking versus future replying). Specifically, we examine whether receiving a reply to a question––and from whom the reply is received––affects a new member’s likelihood of asking another question or replying to a question. We examine fifteen years of data from Statalist, the online community that formed around the Stata statistical software package. Our findings show that receiving a reply from another user is positively associated with future questioning, but negatively associated with future replying. However, receiving a reply from a firm employee is positively associated with future replying. To help address endogeneity concerns, we conducted qualitative interviews with Stata employees, used fixed-effects models, implemented an instrumental variable-based approach, utilized a two-stage Heckman selection model, and applied coarsened exact matching; the findings remain consistent. These findings suggest that social interactions play a key, albeit nuanced, role in shaping subsequent participation and the continued health of a community.