Chen will give an overview of research on public goods provision, and use a recent field experiment as an example. Specifically, Chen uses a large-scale personalized field experiment on Wikipedia to examine the effect of motivation on the contributions of domain experts to public information goods. Experts are 13% more interested in contributing when we mention the private benefit of contribution, such as the likely citation of their work, together with the social impact of the public good. More importantly, Chen finds that greater matching accuracy between a recommended Wikipedia article and an expert's paper abstract increases both contribution quantity and quality. Results show the potential of scalable personalized interventions using recommender systems to study drivers of prosocial behavior.

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