The Role of Online Community in Provision of Public Goods

Online platforms serve as a private provision of public goods by providing services such as knowledge content or financial help. Such platforms usually allow their user to participate in online community where they can communicate and coordinate their activities. In this paper, we investigate the contribution of the users after their participation in online communities on Kiva.org. We aim to understand the role of online community of public goods provision. In the result, we have demonstrated that there is a newcomer effect which lead lenders contribute more after participating in online community. We show that there is a non-linear effect in influencing the contributing patterns of the users.