The Impact of Social Reputation Features in Innovation Tournaments: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This study examines how a change in an online reputation system, specifically the addition of a social reputation feature, affects contestant performance in innovation tournaments. Drawing from the literature on peer recognition and social evaluation anxiety, we project competing effects whereby the feature could either enhance or diminish contestant performance. Furthermore, we hypothesize a series of contingent effects involving the soft reserve, a competitive dynamic that unfolds in tournaments, and a determinant of performance in its own right. Specifically, we hypothesize that the direct influence of the social reputation feature on contestant performance would be predicated on the level of two types of soft reserves in an innovation tournament: that created by the focal contestant and that created by competitors. We test these hypotheses leveraging a natural experiment, where an innovation tournament platform (Kaggle.com) introduced a social reputation feature, allowing contestants to follow other contestants unilaterally. Estimates obtained using a panel data set bracketed within a narrow time window (15 days) around the feature launch reveal that the feature significantly improves the performance. We further report that the two types of soft reserves significantly moderate the positive effect of the social reputation feature on contestant performance, whereby the higher the soft reserve, the weaker the effect of the social reputation feature on contestant performance. These findings have several theoretical and practical implications for managing innovation tournaments.