Online communities have emerged as important organizational forms, but there are many gaps in our understanding. In particular, researchers have mainly focused on individual-level drivers of behaviors in communities, while downplaying (formal, informal) context at various levels. We theorize that different dimensions of context (i.e. omnibus and discrete context) influence decision-making in online communities through mechanisms involving community members’ attention. Specifically, context influences which problems members perceive and which solutions they retrieve and apply, thereby shaping the process of matching solutions and problems. We derive four hypotheses about contribution behaviors in online communities and how such behaviors are influenced by context. The empirical setting for our study is the open-source software community. We find support for our hypotheses in a unique dataset that captures the behavior of 24,057 community members who used the SourceForge.net online platform from 2000 to 2002.

中文翻译：

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上下文和注意力如何塑造在线社区的行为：改进的垃圾桶模型

在线社区已成为重要的组织形式，但我们的理解存在许多差距。特别是，研究人员主要关注社区中个人层面的行为驱动因素，而淡化了各个层面的（正式的、非正式的）背景。我们的理论是，上下文的不同维度（即综合和离散上下文）通过涉及社区成员注意力的机制影响在线社区的决策。具体而言，上下文会影响成员感知哪些问题以及他们检索和应用哪些解决方案，从而影响解决方案和问题的匹配过程。我们推导出关于在线社区中的贡献行为以及这些行为如何受上下文影响的四个假设。我们研究的实证环境是开源软件社区。