Online Public Goods Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, and User-Generated Content

Explaining why people cooperate is a central puzzle across the social sciences. Cooperation is especially surprising with the creation of public goods, where people who do not pay the cost of their creation nonetheless benefit. And yet, public goods such as Wikipedia exist, where people write anonymously without pay or reputational benefit.

In Digital Public Goods, Yan Chen examines how online communities and digital platforms elicit, organize, and sustain contributions to digital public goods. Integrating case studies from the technology sector, social science theories, and experimental evidence, the book covers topics ranging from open scientific data and open-source software to Wikipedia content, citizen science, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and question-and-answer communities." Chen highlights the central challenge of non-participation and free-riding in digital public goods provision and shows what design choices actually increase participation and contribution.

Digital Public Goods is a practical, story-driven guide to how digital platforms solve the free-rider problem and mobilize crowds to produce public goods.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Yan Chen is the Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Chen is a leading scholar in behavioral market design, identity economics, and digital economics. She was the president (2015-17) of the Economic Science Association, and the recipient of the 2019 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award. She is a Fellow of the Economic Science Association since 2024.