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Questions and Adoptions: Stack Overflow and the Choice of Tools

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Abstract

This study investigates the effect of Q&A website answers on the adoption of new technologies. Using data from Stack Overflow and display time on the front page of Stack Overflow as a source of exogenous variation, we find that having a question answered increases the chance that a user will adopt a technology related to the question by __%. This increase is greater for questions that took a long time to be answered. These findings are consistent with the idea that digital community feedback can play a key role in the selection of tools.

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