The Never Ending Book: The role of external stimuli and peer feedback in user-generated content production

This paper studies the determinants of the voluntary provision of user-generated (online) content. Using data from the largest fanfiction website, we find that writers respond differently to new original material: conditional on text length, writing times increase for the average writer and even more for the elite of prolific writer. We explain this finding with quality concerns. In addition, we find supportive evidence that community feedback encourages first-time contributors to continue publishing. For more established writers, we find that community feedback has a rather dampening effect on text lengths and writing times. Overall, these effects are more pronounced for high-quality community feedback ('reviews') compared to low-quality community feedback ('following', 'favoriting').