Badges are endemic to online interaction sites, from Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to ride sharing, as systems for rewarding participants for their contributions. This paper studies how badge design affects people's contributions and behavior over time. Past work has shown that badges "steer" people's behavior toward substantially increasing the amount of contributions before obtaining the badge, and immediately decreasing their contributions thereafter, returning to their baseline contribution levels. In contrast, we find that the steering effect depends on the type of user, as modeled by the rate and intensity of the user's contributions. We use these measures to distinguish between different groups of user activity, including users who are not affected by the badge system despite being significant contributors to the site. We provide a predictive model of how users change their activity group over the course of their lifetime in the system. We demonstrate our approach empirically in three different Q\&A sites on Stack Exchange with hundreds of thousands of users, for two types of activities (editing and voting on posts).

中文翻译：

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一种尺寸并不适合所有人：堆栈溢出中的徽章行为研究

徽章是在线互动网站所特有的，从问答 (Q&A) 网站到拼车，作为奖励参与者贡献的系统。本文研究了徽章设计如何随着时间的推移影响人们的贡献和行为。过去的工作表明，徽章“引导”人们在获得徽章之前大幅增加贡献量的行为，然后立即减少他们的贡献，回到他们的基线贡献水平。相比之下，我们发现转向效果取决于用户的类型，以用户贡献的速率和强度为模型。我们使用这些措施来区分不同的用户活动组，包括不受徽章系统影响的用户，尽管他们是网站的重要贡献者。我们提供了一个预测模型，说明用户在系统中的整个生命周期中如何改变他们的活动组。我们在 Stack Exchange 上的三个不同问答站点中凭经验展示了我们的方法，该站点拥有数十万用户，用于两种类型的活动（编辑和对帖子进行投票）。