Is Institutional Evolution in Online Communities Driven by Selection or Stochasticity?

Institutions and cultures sometimes change adaptively in response to changes in the environment. But sometimes institutional change is due to stochastic drives including drift, path dependency, and blind imitation. Disentangling the selective and stochastic components of social system change enables us to identify the key features to organizational development in the long run. Evo-lutionary approaches provide organizational science abundant theories to demonstrate organi-zational evolution through tracking particular beneficial or harmful features. We applied two of the most applied evolutionary models, the Price equation and the bet-hedging model, on online community data to quantify empirically different drivers in institutional evolution among 20,000 Minecraft communities. As a result, we find strong selection pressure on administrative rules and information rules, suggesting that their positive payoff is the main reason for their frequency change. We also find that stochastic drives decrease the average frequency of administrative rules. The result makes sense when explained in light of evolutionary bet-hedging. Additionally, we show through the bet-hedging result that institutional diversity contributes to the growth and stability of information, communication, and economic rules.