Gamification and incentives
It seems that there is already some prior work on theory of gamification from game theory perspective. For example, Easley &amp; Ghosh (2016), provide theory on optimal badge design even explicitly mentioning sites like StackOverflow and their paper seems to be highly cited.  Hamari, Huotari &amp; Tolvanen (2015) have article titled &quot;Gamification and economics&quot; which offers a survey of uses of gamification in various economic concepts. The paper itself does not seem to offer any novel models but it offers a literature review with a chapter specifically focusing on game theory.