Understanding whether and how motivation affects participation in online experiments is critical because who contributes and how they contribute can affect the validity of findings. Analyzing data from 7,674 participants across three different studies on the volunteer-based online experiment platform LabintheWild, we identified five motivation types for participating: boredom, comparison, fun, science, and self-learning. We found that these motivation types affect study selection, attention, and dropouts. Participants who were highly motivated by boredom paid less attention and were more likely to dropout than those who were motivated by the possibility of contributing to science. We additionally show that motivation can impact study results and suggest how researchers can take participants' motivation into account when designing and analyzing data from volunteer-based online experiments.
Rapidly developing web technologies have increased the prevalence of user-generated Internet content. Of the many websites with user-generated content on the Internet, one of the most renowned is Wikipedia, which is the largest multilingual free-content encyclopedia written by users collaboratively. Nevertheless, although contributing to Wikipedia takes time and knowledge, contributors are rarely compensated. As a result, there is a need to understand why individuals share their knowledge in Wikipedia. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of both conventional and self concept-based motivation on individual willingness to share knowledge in Wikipedia. After performing an online questionnaire survey, SEM was applied to assess the proposed model and hypotheses. The analytical results showed that internal self-concept motivation is the key motivation for knowledge sharing on Wikipedia.
The phenomenon of job satisfaction generates high costs for organizations, as it impacts on the processes of selection, training, and motivation of their human resources, while affecting the produc...