Size Does Matter: Why Knowledge Markets Can Fail at Scale!

In this paper, we model the community question answering (CQA) websites on Stack Exchange platform as knowledge markets, and analyze how and why these markets can fail at scale. Analyzing CQA websites as markets allows site operators to reason about the failures in knowledge markets, and design policies to prevent these failures. Our main contribution is to provide insight on knowledge market failures. We explore a set of interpretable economic production models to capture content generation dynamics in knowledge markets. The best performing of these, well-known in economic literature as Cobb-Douglas equation, provides an intuitive explanation for content generation in the knowledge markets. Specifically, it shows that (1) factors of content generation such as user participation and content dependency have constant elasticity—a percentage increase in any of the inputs leads to a constant percentage increase in the output, (2) in many markets, factors exhibit diminishing returns—the incremental, marginal output decreases as the input is incrementally increased, (3) markets vary according to their returns to scale—the increase in output resulting from a proportionate increase in all inputs, and finally (4) many markets exhibit diseconomies of scale—measures of market health decrease as a function of overall system size (number of participants). ACM Reference format: Himel Dev1, Chase Geigle1, QingtaoHu1, Jiahui Zheng2 andHari Sundaram1. 2017. Size Does Matter: Why Knowledge Markets Can Fail at Scale!. In Proceedings of ACM Conference, Washington, DC, USA, July 2017 (Conference’17),