Awarding users digital badges for their contributions such as generating valuable content and participating in community activities has become an increasingly popular practice on user-generated content (UGC) platforms to incentivize user engagement. Beyond their immediate effects, digital badges can have enduring effects on UGC consumption and generation by affecting users’ underlying engagement states. To account for both effects, the authors develop a bivariate negative binomial hidden Markov model of content consumption and generation and estimate the model using a panel data set obtained from a large UGC platform. They find that users increase their content generation but decrease their content consumption immediately after being awarded a digital badge. Furthermore, being awarded a digital badge has a positive enduring effect on both content consumption and content generation behaviors of a user. This positive enduring effect mainly applies to users in relatively engaged states but not to users in the least engaged state. Finally, the authors demonstrate the value of the proposed model with respect to assessing consumer responses to the design of digital badges.

为用户的贡献（例如生成有价值的内容和参与社区活动）颁发数字徽章已成为用户生成内容 (UGC) 平台上越来越流行的做法，以激励用户参与。除了直接影响之外，数字徽章还可以通过影响用户的潜在参与状态对 UGC 消费和生成产生持久影响。为了考虑这两种影响，作者开发了一个内容消费和生成的双变量负二项式隐马尔可夫模型，并使用从大型 UGC 平台获得的面板数据集估计该模型。他们发现用户在获得数字徽章后立即增加了内容生成但减少了内容消费。此外，获得数字徽章对用户的内容消费和内容生成行为都有积极的持久影响。这种积极持久的影响主要适用于处于相对参与状态的用户，而不适用于处于最低参与状态的用户。最后，作者证明了所提出模型在评估消费者对数字徽章设计的反应方面的价值。