Engagement and Cooperation in Social Networks: Do Benefits and Rewards Help?

Engagement serves as an important metrics in judging the success of any online social network. It is thus important to identify how specific mechanisms can help build engagement. In this work, we investigate how rewarding members for their honesty can offer better engagement and raise the level of cooperativeness in the society. We define a write-rate game to simulate activities in an online forum like setting and conduct experiments with it. Our results show that providing right reward for honest actions promotes engagement and cooperation in the society.