Empirical Research On The Relationship Between Motivation And Behavior Of Peer Producer In Baidupedia And Open Source Software Community

Peer production, a new mode of knowledge production, was coined by Bankler and it was described as the world-distributed web users'cooperative knowledge production activities based on the Internet. And the web users participated in peer production were called peer producer. The Wikipedia and Linux operation system are two famous examples of peer production projects. Many researchers from different fields such as economy, sociology, humanism, physics and computer science have focused high attention on peer production since it was proposed in 2002. Though peer producers seldom get financial compensation for their participation or contribution, they still would like to take part in the production activities such as editing entry, coding, communicating with others and helping with each other. And this specific characteristic in peer production has aroused researchers'interest to explore the peer producer's behavior, motivation, the relationship between behavior and motivation and so on.Since most studies basically focused on such rationale like the direct effect of peer producer's motivation to their behavior. Notably, the behavior mechanism is a process including subject's perceiving, decision-making, and participation. And there are various motives to each specific period. Up to date, rare studies covered the aforementioned point and more importantly, the social action properties of this production haven't been put into consideration in research, which is an significant and core factor to understand the behavior mechanism of peer producers. Specially, the current research clarified the motives of the peer producers by employ the theory of social motives.What's more, China has a mass of web users and the peer production project based on Chinese language has great prospect and is well worthy in exploration. However, few literatures concerned about the Chinese peer production project so far. Hence, the current research focused Baidupedia and Open Source Software Community which are the representative examples of two types of peer production projects——Open Source Content Projects and Open Source Software Projects, respectively.With the consideration mentioned before, the current research proposed a specific framework based on the theory of social motives in order to explore the relations of peer producers'motives of behavior. The core rationale is that the process of participation in peer production is a process including perception, decision-making, and participation, in which the motives were explored specifically. What's more, based on the theory of social motives, the current research classified the motives as social motives and personal motives, based on which the framework of Chinese peer producers'motives were proposed. Hopefully, it would be helpful to understand the Chinese peer producers'characteristics specifically.Based on the interview with users from Baidupedia and Open Source Software Community, the current research built up two sets of questionnaire respectively with good reliability and validity tested thereafter. Totally 1000 users received the investigations and 652 valid questionnaires (322 for Baidupedia and 330 for Open Source Software Community) were collected. By Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), the mechanism of the behavioral process (perception, decision-making, and participation) was tested with good fitting index. The results showed that: the behavior of Baidupedians and Open Source Software Community users were triggered respectively by a process of perception, decision-making, and participation, which was outgrew the pure motivation exploration in earlier studies; peer producers'motives could be clarified based on the theory of social action and the relations among the motives were detected; differences and commons were drawn by comparing the motivation and behavior of Baidupeia users with that of Open Source Software Community users; Chinese peer producers and their foreign counter parts shared common motives to participating in production and have their specific characteristics respectively. Finally the main contribution, limits of current research, and further implications were discussed.