Mechanism of User Participation in Co-creation Community: A Network Evolutionary Game Method

Active participation closely associates with the sustainable operation of co-creation communities. Different from recent studies on the promotion of sustainable operation by identifying the internal and external motivations of user participation, this paper aims to analyze the mechanism regarding how different motivations affect the decision of user participation from group-level perspective. To better understand the mechanism, internal and external motivations are, respectively, captured by return-cost analysis and user interactive network. Afterwards, a network evolutionary game model was formulated to analyze the dynamic strategy selection (e.g., active participation and passive participation) of all users. In addition, the stable equilibrium and evolutionary path of strategies are analyzed through computational experiments. Results indicate the following: (a) Rewards have an influence on the promotion of active participation. However, with the continued growth of rewards, this promotion does not make sense sustainably. (b) The promotional effect of information noise on the selection of active participation can be found when passive participation is the dominant strategy. However, the inhibitory effect can be seen in populations that mainly adopt active participation. (c) The scale-free feature of user interactive network inhibits the selection of active participation when active participation is the dominant strategy in populations. Results found here is beneficial for managers to implement the specified policies and thus to achieve the sustainability of co-creation community.