Motivation and Performance of User-Contributors: Evidence from a CQA Forum

There is an increasing prevalence of Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) websites and a growing reliance of the online community on user-generated content. In this paper, we study users' motivation to win social recognition contests (best answers) and how multitasking and flexible hours influence the performance of contest-motivated users. Heterogeneity of contest motivation is estimated at the user level in a standard contest framework and used to demonstrate that for those who are highly motivated to win contests, multitasking across subjects is associated with lower productivity while flexible hours are associated with higher productivity, as proxied by the rate of winning contests.