I'm a researcher in the School of Management at the U. of Haifa
(http://gsb.haifa.ac.il).  I am currently doing some research on
Google Answers and would be glad to hear from you:

How do you choose whether or not to answer a question?

Hello valueofinformation-ga,

Basically, I choose whether or not to answer a question depending on
how much background knowledge I have, what mood I am in (more work
oriented or more of a hobby related question), the question value
(although I have put hours into some low-cost questions), as well as
looking at the history of the asker (how they have rated other
researchers).

I think this is personal question that could be directed at each
individual researcher. Basically for me it boils down to:

#1 My interest level and background knowledge of the question
#2 The question value
#3 My mood/available time
#4 Who is asking the question (I preferred new customers or customers
that have rated fellow researchers fairly)

For me it certainly was more of a hobby than anything else for most of
the time, although I did have a few months where I focused quite
successfully on getting a better return.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you need me to clarify anything. 

All the best,

tisme-ga

Thanks tisme-ga.  This is very helpful.
Daphne

For me the order was:
1. How much does it pay vs. what I perceive to be the effort involved
to find an answer?  If I already knew the answer, and just needed to
find a source to support it, then I would be willing to pursue an
inexpensive question.  My interest level in the subject matter also
influenced my decisions, somewhat.  However, I generally avoided
anything that was less than $10.
2. How much do I know about the subject?  I had to at least feel
confident I knew enough keywords to use as search terms.
3. What did my initial search turn up?  If the material was not even
close, and did not yield better search terms, then I tended to drop it
and let some other Researcher have a crack at it.  Often I would find
only one or two decent resources as a result of the first search, but
it would contain better terminology than my original search terms, and
a second search proved to generate much better information.
4. Did I feel the material I uncovered adequately answered the
question and would represent a good value for the customer?  I wanted
to answer higher value questions very completely.  Sometimes that just
was not possible, and then I judged the difficulty of the question to
assess if someone was likely to be able to come up with a better
answer.  Usually my judgements were acceptable to the customer.  On a
couple of occasions, they were not, and that's when refunds get
issued.  Fortunately, that was very rare.

I hope this helps you.

Sincerely,

Wonko