Incentive design to mould online behavior: a game mechanics perspective

Abstract

Designing incentives to shape user behavior in line with system goals is a precarious feat. These goals can be diverse, ranging from user retention to streamlining content creation. Yet there is no playbook available in the art to be applied on such motivation problems. Pertaining to website rollout strategies, there exists a commonality in goals shared by businesses owners. We deployed an innovative incentive model in our enterprise social network knome to aid these goals. In this paper, we study how awarding points using 'Incentive Economy' strategy can mould online user behavior, in a way to meet the founding goals of a platform. We proposed few measures that can be adopted by other website owners to reach their behavior goals using game mechanics. With about 288,273 employees in TCS generating millions of interactions well over the span of 14 months, we extracted several interesting observations from knome. To our knowledge this is one of the largest studies of its nature done in enterprise settings, which in itself exposed unknown challenges. Our output suggests that incentives are effective in moulding user behaviour when coupled with right motivational strategies and targeted delivery, varying with personality types. Additional contributions include, an awarding strategy that can help websites to measure the effectiveness of individual game mechanics and incentives.