Incentivized Token Peer-Reward Mechanism

In Simple Words

Picture a workplace bonus system where employees receive weekly tickets to award to colleagues who helped them most; those tickets enter a raffle for a valuable prize only if the recipient achieves top performance.

Research question

In large online peer networks, participants lack natural incentives to invest time giving high-quality feedback to peers without monetary or social rewards.

Participants

N = 4,660 treated entrepreneurs across 60-person interaction groups in Africa.

Study Design

Bi-weekly allocation of 10 digital tokens to each entrepreneur to distribute to helpful peers. Tokens from the top-50 ranked entrepreneurs after Stage 1 evaluation served as lottery tickets for 30 fully funded Bocconi Prizes (Milan trip, pitching event, business course).

Results

Token references were among the top 10 most frequent terms in individual-to-individual messages (terms such as "token", "giveusername", "leaderboard"). The bilateral token economy successfully induced strategic peer searching and reciprocal communication across virtual channels.

Takeaway

Issue periodic peer-reward tokens linked to high-value performance-contingent prizes to stimulate active peer review and feedback in online learning networks.

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