Challenge Accepted! - The Impcat of Goal Achievement on Subsequent User Effort and Implications of a Goal's Difficulty

We empirically investigate the impact of successful goal achievement on future effort to attain the next goal in a recurring goal framework. We use data from a popular German Question & Answer community where goals are represented in the form of badges. In particular, our analysis of this data hinges on the fact, that in this Question & Answer community, badges in a hierarchical badge system are in-creasingly challenging to attain up to a certain badge. After this certain badge, the difficulty level sud-denly drops and remains constant throughout up to the last badge in the hierarchy. Our findings indi-cate that after successful badge achievement users increase their subsequent effort to attain the next badge, but only as long as badges represent a challenge to the user. According to our analysis, we identify self-learning to be the key driver of this behavior.