  When foraging for information, users face a tradeoff between the accuracy and
value of the acquired information and the time spent collecting it, a problem
which also surfaces when seeking answers to a question posed to a large
community. We empirically study how people behave when facing these conflicting
objectives using data from Yahoo Answers, a community driven
question-and-answer site. We first study how users behave when trying to
maximize the amount of acquired information while minimizing the waiting time.
We find that users are willing to wait longer for an additional answer if they
have received a small number of answers. We then assume that users make a
sequence of decisions, deciding to wait for an additional answer as long as the
quality of the current answer exceeds some threshold. The resulting probability
distribution for the number of answers that a question gets is an inverse
Gaussian, a fact that is validated by our data.
