I've seen this behavior on some other exchanges, where users will offer a bounty on a question simply because the answer is good and deserves more rep. Here's one extreme example. Perhaps this behavior is simply less common here because we don't have as many high rep users. Just for a comparison with Science Fiction & Fantasy:
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Rep | SciFi Users | SFSE Users
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100,000+ | 3 | 1
50,000+ | 15 | 2
25,000+ | 38 | 6
10,000+ | 100 | 32
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Badge | SciFi Users | SFSE Users
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Legendary | 6 | 0
Epic | 17 | 2
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That difference is...stark, so I can see why there might be fewer users on here who feel like they have reputation to "spare" and bandy about on bounties. We don't even have double digit users who can offer such bounties without losing any Privileges
. We don't even have plural users with six figures! Actually last week we didn't even have any (congrats again).
- Are there other reasons we don't award "promotional bounties"? Do we think it's kosher?
- When offering a "promotional bounty", is it cool to run it for the entire duration to draw more attention?
See also the last reason on this list:
Reward existing answer
One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty.