A Journey of Bounty Hunters: Analyzing the Influence of Reward Systems on StackOverflow Question Response Times

Abstract

Question and Answering (Q&A) platforms are an important source for information and a first place to go when searching for help. Q&A sites, like StackOverflow (SO), use reward systems to incentivize users to answer fast and accurately. In this paper we study and predict the response time for those questions on StackOverflow, that benefit from an additional incentive through so called bounties. Shaped by different motivations and rules these questions perform unlike regular questions. As our key finding we note that topic related factors provide a much stronger evidence than previously found factors for these questions. Finally, we compare models based on these features predicting the response time in the context of bounty questions.