NorMASS: A normative MAS-based modeling approach for simulating incentive mechanisms of Q&A communities

Incentive mechanisms steer users in Q&A communities to achieve community goals, which need to be cautiously reviewed and revised before actual industrial application. Simulating incentive mechanisms is significant for predicting how changes in incentive mechanisms will affect community emergence, such as user answering patterns. However, due to the complexity of Q&A communities, the challenge faced by simulating incentive mechanisms lies in the difficulty of establishing micro-macro connections in the communities to simulate their emergence. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a Normative Multi-Agent System based Simulation (NorMASS) approach to simulate community emergence. The NorMASS models a Q&A community as a normative multi-agent system and adopts agents to formally express community users. Moreover, the approach provides an open-source simulator with a data generator to simulate community emergence. An evaluation of the NorMASS comparing simulation emergence with the counterpart of an actual community demonstrates that the proposed approach provides an effective solution for simulating incentive mechanisms of Q&A communities, with a similarity of 80% or above.