New: 50/50 Norm in Massive Online Public Good: The Case of Wikipedia

This paper exhibits the existence of a strong social norm in a massive online public good, revealed by the choice of the equal split in the dictator game. With the help of the French Wikimédia Foundation, we have invited Wikipedia community to participate (through the questionnaire), to a simulation exercise of a dictator game (DG). This procedure, standard in the experimental economics literature, has been conducted here on a very large scale, since the number of persons who completed the whole questionnaire amounts to more than 13,000. This has provided us with a huge sample, and has given statistically relevant evidence on the way people abide or not by some sorts of social norms. We have also shown that both contributors and non contributors adhere to this norm, and that it is correlated to the “patronage” of Wikipedia, as those who often use the encyclopedia, or have been using it for several years, or declare a strong attachment to it, are more willing to choose the 50/50 split …
Source: Publications document de travail