Gordon Burtch

Research interests: Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, User Generated Content, Field Experiments, Gig Economy.

Gordon Burtch’s primary interest is on the design of digital platforms, and assessing the value of features, mechanisms or policies through empirical studies, whether using archival data or field experiments. He examines the introduction of particular features or mechanisms that affect user behavior. For example, in a study that was recently published in Management Science, he and fellow co-authors ran a field experiment wherein they randomly allocated “peer awards” to users’ posts on Reddit in creative writing communities, to examine how those types of awards influence sustained participation, creativity, etc. in the production of user-generated content. Another study ran an experiment on a dating platform, randomly providing some users with information on peer availability (how many dating requests has the peer received recently) to see if this can help reduce congestion on the platform (a small subset of users getting an excess of attention), and they show that it works, making the distribution of attention received “flatter,” more evenly spread out across users.