Public goods versagt der Markt, lernt jeder Student der Volkswirtschaftslehre. Doch der Erfolg von Wikipedia widerlegt diese Theorie und ist eine der am häufigsten besuchten Internetseiten weltweit. Warum, zeigt eine neue Studie.
Was für ein Irrtum. Im Sommer 2002 berichtete die „Berliner Zeitung“ als eines der ersten deutschen Medien über das Internetlexikon Wikipedia – fasziniert, aber auch skeptisch: „Doch mag das Wissensreservoir auch regen Zulauf haben und stetig wachsen: In nächster Zeit wird es ihm wohl nicht gelingen, Referenzwerken wie dem Brockhaus den Rang abzulaufen.“ Keine sechs Jahre später teilte der Brockhaus-Verlag das Aus für das gedruckte Lexikon mit – und Wikipedia ist now one of the most frequently visited web sites worldwide. Tens of thousands work for Wikipedia, voluntarily and receive no salary. A success story that economists brings declaration needs. Their traditional theories suggest that it would not even have the rise of the Internet lexicon may be. Why should rational individuals make the effort to write encyclopedia articles free of charge for an anonymous audience? Any Internet user can use the online encyclopedia, without himself contributing posts. This is Wikipedia
what economists call a "public good" - an offer that benefits all people and excluded from the use of which no one werden kann. Klassische Beispiele dafür sind Deiche und Straßenlaternen. Bei öffentlichen Gütern, so lernen angehende Volkswirte im Grundstudium, gibt es ein großes Dilemma: Es existieren starke Anreize zum Trittbrettfahrertum – dazu, das Angebot zu nutzen, ohne eine Gegenleistung zu erbringen. Die traditionelle Volkswirtschaftslehre postuliert: Je größer die Zahl der potenziellen Nutznießer ist, desto mehr Probleme entstehen mit Trittbrettfahrern.
Zumindest bei Wikipedia ist genau das Gegenteil der Fall, zeigt eine neue Studie, die demnächst im "American Economic Review" erscheint: Je größer die Zahl der potenziellen Leser, desto eher sind Menschen bereit, ihre Arbeitszeit für spend the online encyclopedia - probably because they draw mental satisfaction from the fact that their text can be read by many others.
Scientists Xiaoquan Zhang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) and Feng Zhu (University of Southern California) demonstrate this effect using the example of the Chinese Wikipedia page. They use the fact that the government in Beijing has repeatedly censored the site for politically unwelcome information. From October 2005, for example were Internet users in China, the Wikipedia page, do not call for nearly a year. By blocking the target audience of Wikipedia has decreased drastically over night. Million Internet users were suddenly excluded. For Chinese-language People in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the rest of the world remained the side, however, available.
what consequences this had for the activities on the website? The researchers focused on the behavior of users outside the People's Republic of China - people who, despite barring further access to the site and were able to change it. Zhang and Zhu use the fact that all changes are recorded in detail in texts on the Wikipedia page, and draw conclusions on the country, home to the authors. They compared the activities in Wikipedia immediately before and after the lock. They noted: With the start of blockage in Chinese-speaking Internet users outside the People's Republic of significantly less interested to Wikipedia - they wrote abruptly fewer new contributions and extended existing texts much less frequently.
"The participation of authors is not blocked by the blockade decreased on average by 42.8 percent," the economists note. The reason: Employees at Wikipedia procure satisfaction of the individual authors - researchers speak of "social benefit". "The shrinking size of the group reduces this benefit," they write. One indication of this is precisely the authors, where the social aspect of Wikipedia was very important and intensively cavorting on the discussion boards of the lexicon, wrote with the start of the lock significantly less. "Our study provides empirical evidence that social effects may be stronger than the tendency to freeloaders," is the conclusion. The study shows once again: economists make a mistake when they explain to the people for purely selfish - they can not explain many phenomena of real life right.
"Group Size and Incentive to Contribute: A Natural Experiment at Chinese Wikipedia" in Xiaoquan Zhang and Feng Zhu appears in: American Economic Review
Source: Handelsblatt
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