Are Donation Badges Appealing? A Case Study of Developer Responses to Eclipse Bug Reports
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Eclipse, an open source software project, acknowledges its donors by presenting donation badges in its issue tracking system Bugzilla. However, the rewarding effect of this strategy is currently unknown. We applied a framework of causal inference to investigate relative promptness of developer response to bug reports with donation badges compared with bug reports without the badges, and estimated that donation badges decrease developer response time by about two hours in median. The appearance of donation badges is appealing for both donors and organizers because of its inexpensive but practical effects.
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