Attention harvesting for knowledge production

This dissertation seeks to understand and study the process of attention harvesting and knowledge production on typical online Q&A communities. Goals of this study include quantifying the attention harvesting and online knowledge, damping the effect of competition for attention on knowledge production, and examining the diversity of user behaviors on question answering. Project 1 starts with a simplistic discrete time model on a scale-free network and provides the method to measure the attention harvested. Further, project 1 highlights the effect of distractions on harvesting productive attention and in the end concludes which factors are influential and sensitive to the attention harvesting. The main finding is the critical condition to optimize the attention harvesting on the network by reducing network connection. Project 2 extends the scope of the study to quantify the value and quality of knowledge, focusing on the question answering dynamics. This part of research models how attention was distributed under typical answering strategies on a virtual online Q&A community. The final result provides an approach to measure the efficiency of attention transferred into value production and observes the contribution of different scenarios under various computed metrics. Project 3 is an advanced study on the foundation of the virtual question answering community from project 2. With highlights of different user behavioral preferences, algorithm stochastically simulates individual decisions and behavior. Results from sensitivity analysis on different mixtures of user groups gives insight of nonlinear dynamics for the objectives of success. Simulation finding shows reputation rewarding mechanism on Stack Overflow shapes the crowd mixture of behavior to be successful. In addition, project proposed an attention allocation scenario of question answering to improve the success metrics when coupling with a particular selection strategy.