mimir: A Market-Based Real-Time Question and Answer Service

Community-based question and answer (Q&A) systems facilitate information exchange and enable the creation of reusable knowledge repositories. While these systems are growing in usage and are changing how people find and share information, current designs are inefficient, wasting the time and attention of their users. Furthermore, existing systems do not support signaling and screening of joking and non-serious questions. Coupling Q&A services with instant and text messaging for faster questions and answers may exacerbate these issues, causing Q&A services to incur high interruption costs on their users. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of a market-based real-time Q&A system. We compared its use to a similar Q&A system without a market. We found that while markets can reduce wasted resources by reducing the number of less important questions and low quality answers, it may also reduce the socially conducive questions and usages that are vital to sustaining a Q&A community.