Analytics Dashboards and User Behavior: Evidence from GitHub

In open source software development it is essential to stimulate developers’ contribution behavior in the absence of monetary incentives. But research on potential secondary effects of these stimuli, such as on contribution sentiment, remains scarce. Thus, we investigate how a promising external stimulus, an analytics dashboard, influences developers’ number of contributions as well as associated message length and sentiment. Building on social comparison and goal setting theory we hypothesize that adopting the analytics dashboard increases developers’ number of contributions but decreases contribution message length and sentiment. To test these hypotheses, we leverage granular data from a matched sample of 43,434 GitHub developers over two years who adopted an analytics dashboard on their personal developer page. Our difference-in-differences analyses reveal that adopting the analytics dashboard increases a developers’ number of contributions and associated message length. However, after adopting the analytics dashboard users write more negative messages and this effect is primarily driven by users with low initial GitHub activity. These findings suggest that the performance increase through analytics dashboards comes at the cost of potentially harmful consequences for the developers or the platform. We discuss implications for theory and practice.