Pay-for-Answer Platform:Monetary Incentive Scheme,Knowledge Types And Effort

Knowledge sharing plays an increasingly important role in the development of organizations and individuals.The rise of the pay-for-answer platform has developed a new approach for promoting knowledge sharing.However,it is not clear that whether the pricing model affect knowledge contributors'effort and performance.Therefore,this paper focuses on the pricing model of the pay-for-answer platform,and compares the impact of the pricing model decided by respondents(fixed compensation)and the pricing model decided by questioners(tournament)on the respondent's effort and the quality of the answer.By conducting a 2*2 experiment,we found that the overall performance of the respondent was higher under the condition of the respondent's pricing model(fixed compensation)than that of the questioner's pricing model(tournament).It is also found that the type of knowledge affects the relationship between pricing models and effort&performance.The positive impact of the fixed compensation on job performance is only significant when transferring tacit knowledge;however,this relationship is not significant when transferring explicit knowledge.This finding suggests that different incentive schemes should be designed for different types of knowledge in order to effectively improve the effectiveness of knowledge sharing.This paper contributes to the literature and practice in several ways.First,existing accounting literature on knowledge sharing mainly focus on general organizational factors' effects,rather few paper pays attention to money incentive scheme factors.Second,this research provides a new perspective for the role of money incentives and evaluation measures in knowledge sharing field,where explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge related to different performance measures.In practice,for different types of pay-for-answer platforms,it provides them with insights of incentive schemes that work in different situations.What's more,it is also helpful in knowledge management of enterprises,inspiring managers how to encourage knowledge sharing with different types of knowledge.