Draw your own conclusions...
From his website:

In my research, I identify incentive mechanisms: technological design patterns that lead to predictable, desirable behavior. Having a toolbox of incentive mechanisms allows us to move from building technical systems to engineering socio-technical systems. Identifying these causal relationships also allows us to better understand the use of these systems, and the effects these systems have on their users.

To identify and characterize incentive mechanisms, I draw on theories of motivation and incentives from human-computer interaction, economics, communications, and social psychology to understand, explain, and then predict behavior of users. I combine these theories with my computer science background to identify and design technical features that can reliably induce desired behaviors across a wide variety of computer systems. I use this interdisciplinary approach because these systems are inherently socio-technical; their effectiveness depends critically on both the social behavior and the technical design of the system. I use a variety of approaches to study incentive mechanisms in social media; my research includes economic modeling, quantitative server log analysis, both lab and field experiments, and qualitative inquiry.

: I still think this is a psychological study (since I can NOT take
: it seriously as a communications study). Like, what will people
: do for $10? Or, if we dangle the $10 incentive among various
: online communities, what communities -- what types of people --
: will be most responsive?

: :