Online Reputational Loss Aversion: Empirical Evidence from StackOverflow.com

Do people care equally about reputational gains and losses? We study this question by analyzing users' contribution to online knowledge repositories, with data from StackOverflow.com, a website for user-curated technical questions and answers. We find that users who receive upvotes are encouraged to post more answers. But more interestingly, when users receive downvotes to their answers, they are much more strongly encouraged to post more answers. Reputational losses (downvotes) elicit a stronger reaction in users than reputational gains (upvotes), suggesting the presence of reputational loss aversion.