  Online communities adopt various reputation schemes to measure content
quality. This study analyzes the effect of a new reputation scheme that exposes
one's offline social status, such as an education degree, within an online
community. We study two Reddit communities that adopted this scheme, whereby
posts include tags identifying education status referred to as flairs, and we
examine how the "transferred" social status affects the interactions among the
users. We computed propensity scores to test whether flairs give ad-hoc
authority to the adopters while minimizing the effects of confounding variables
such as topics of content. The results show that exposing academic degrees is
likely to lead to higher audience votes as well as larger discussion size,
compared to the users without the disclosed identities, in a community that
covers peer-reviewed scientific articles. In another community with a focus on
casual science topics, exposing mere academic degrees did not obtain such
benefits. Still, the users with the highest degree (e.g., Ph.D. or M.D.) were
likely to receive more feedback from the audience. These findings suggest that
reputation schemes that link the offline and online worlds could induce halo
effects on feedback behaviors differently depending upon the community culture.
We discuss the implications of this research for the design of future
reputation mechanisms.
