Are Contributions to P2P Technical Forums Private or Public Goods? – An Empirical Investigation

P2P technical support forums are widely used by information technology (IT) firms as supplements for technical support call centers. A typical technical support forum allows customers to post technical questions and receive answers from their peers. From time to time, customers may also receive answers directly from a firm’s technical support teams, although many forums explicitly state that forums are not officially supported by the sponsoring firms. Technical support forums also provide archives of customer-tocustomer communications and extensive search functions, thus serve as knowledge networks for information and knowledge exchange among peer customers. In the IT industry, where product complexity is rapidly escalating service demands, firms rely on these forums to reduce service demands and minimize after-sales service costs.