An empirical study of financial incentivized question answering in social websites

With the rapid growth of online social network sites such as Face-book and Twitter, social question and answering (Q&A) has become an important venue for people to seek and share information. However, due to lack of specific Q&A feature design and users' motivations in answering questions, social Q&A has been reported to have a much lower response rate compared with traditional professional Q&A sites such as Stack Overflow and Yahoo! Answers. Recently, WenDa, an emerging social Q&A product built on top of a leading Chinese social website (Sina WeiBo) has been launched to fill this gap. WenDa employs a novel economic model to motivate users to ask and answer questions. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to understand the effectiveness of this economic model in motivating users to participate in the social Q&A. Besides, we analyze how this economic model and the social user relationships shape the question types as well as question topics. Our observations and study results are of significant values in providing insights for the design and development of social Q&A.