Peer Competition on Collaborative Platforms : A Lever for Acquisition of Expert Status

Collaborative platforms have become essential devices for solving problems, sharing experiences and developing skills. Using a sociomaterial approach, the objective of this study is to explain how these platforms manage to produce recognized experts. From an experimentation on the Management & Datascience platform, we observe the organization of digital challenges. We test the impact of technological properties by proposing a structural equation model. The results underline the influence of the platforms’ sociomateriality in the search for expert status. They reveal that competition-based relationships have a partial mediating effect between digital affordances and expertise acquisition. These results provide empirical evidence for the impact of peer competition in the process of acquiring expert status. The study contributes to the literature by enriching the understanding of the role played by social interactions within collaborative platforms.