Stack Exchange and reward for being on the top

As mentioned in the previous posts, Stack Exchange has a very interpretable structure. It's a market in which demand for answering a question meets supply, and supply is paid with upvotes. Such a rude interpretation is necessary for learning how knowledge exchange works.

I once looked into a demand side of Stack Exchange, but now a few points on the supply side. In general, we are interested in efficient allocation of resources. Given the fact that sometimes one answer is enough (especially for software development questions), many answers may be a waste.

And that's the distribution of answers per question:

Well, it's a peak at 2 with a long tail. The details:

number of answers	Freq.	Percent	Cum.
1	2,123	18.35	18.35
2	2,601	22.48	40.83
3	2,138	18.48	59.3
4	1,458	12.6	71.9
5	967	8.36	80.26
6	674	5.82	86.09
7	461	3.98	90.07
8	325	2.81	92.88
9	190	1.64	94.52
10	135	1.17	95.69

About 80 percent of questions end with five answers or less.

The Reward for Being on the Top

But what's the reward for having your answer on the top of the others? These are the means of fractions of total upvotes by the position a given answer occupies:

It says that the answer on the top have an stable advantage over all answers to a given question. You can see that after the fifth answer, adding more answers does not decrease total upvotes given to the existing answers. And the first answer gets no less that half of all upvotes.

That's a huge bonus, since multiple other answers have to split the remaining half of upvotes. That may be discouraging for participants, as competition is high and the winner takes all.

Sample summary statistics

Variable	Obs	Mean	Std. Dev.	Min	Max
upvotes	45463	5.390141	24.11624	0	1553
downvotes	45463	0.1868992	0.9164532	0	82
net (up - down)	45463	5.203242	23.94713	-19	1552
position	45463	4.449794	6.709625	1	114
total_answers	45463	7.899589	10.94102	1	114
relative position	45463	0.6272573	0.2922457	0.0087719	1
total_uv_b~q	45463	67.75934	221.0013	0	2488
frac_uv	44188	0.2440255	0.3074606	0	1