AGENT-BASED MODELING TO INFORM ECOLOGICAL COEXISTENCE OF ONLINE COMMUNITIES: IMPACT OF COMMUNITY SIZE, PARTICIPATION COST, TOPIC BREADTH AND POPULATION INTEREST DISTRIBUTION

Abstract

In literature, many factors are believed to have effects on online communities' development. Few of them are investigated with the existence of other communities, in other words, ecological coexistence of two or more communities. In this work, we explore this ecological coexistence problems in online communities context. To be specific, we examine the impact of community size, participation cost, topic breadth and population interest distribution. We use agent-based modeling to understand both main and interaction effects of those factors. Also, we validate the results with regression methods. We believe that this work contributes to not online communities but also organizational ecology literature.