Abstract
Due to scarcity of designers in fast fashion industry and proliferation of the Internet, small- and medium-sized garment makers have gradually turned to external designers to enhance their innovation efficiency via crowdsourcing initiative. However, few have investigated the issue of fast fashion customized-design matching decision in the crowdsourcing context. Different from previous works, we split crowdsourcing matching decision process into three hierarchical submodels in terms of three key factors, namely, surplus, due date, and goodwill. From a dynamic perspective, we first develop a two-sided matching model where garment makers and online designers select one another by maximizing their total surpluses with an aim to reach robust final pairs and derive the corresponding conditions under which the optimal pairs can be obtained. Then, the extensions of the matching model are conducted by incorporating the critical factors of due date and garment makers’ goodwill, respectively. Followed by that, an improved Gale–Shapley algorithm is devised to solve the crowdsourcing matching problems. The results illustrate when garment makers exceed online designers in number, crowdsourcing design tasks without due-date constraint are more attractive for designers’ participation than those with due-date constraint, and garment makers intend to share the incremental surpluses with designers to maximize the total surpluses. By contrast, when online designers surpass garment makers in number, designers prefer due-date design tasks to those without it. In addition, regardless of whether under the irregular or regular case, the model with goodwill concern always outperforms the two others. Moreover, celebrated garment makers are invited to post design tasks, thus enabling to entice more designers’ engagement in crowdsourcing activities, which in turn facilitating to transfer myopic designers to strategic ones. Finally, sensitivity analysis further verifies the models are stable and robust.
Highlights
Due to scarcity of designers in fast fashion industry and proliferation of the Internet, small- and medium-sized garment makers have gradually turned to external designers to enhance their innovation efficiency via crowdsourcing initiative
We focus on the issue of garment makerdesigner matching in the fast fashion crowdsourcing context
To handle such a problem, we propose the matching model using a dynamic hierarchical method and analyze the impact of three different matching submodels on crowdsourcing performance, including the two-sided matching model and the extended model with due-date constraint, as well as one with due-date and garment makers’ goodwill concern
Summary
We consider the case where crowdsourcing designers are myopic and only concern about present utility, rather than focus on long-term gains, i.e., myopic crowdsourcees underline the current benefits and do not care about the next-round benefits. Consider that the crowdsourcing platform serves as an interface between online designers and garment makers, such that the garment makers are charged at a platform service fee Sij, implying the garment maker’s (i) cost includes two parts Rij,present and Sij. erefore, the garment maker’s utility is defined as follows: UMij Bij − Rij,present − Sij. e first term of the right side of equation (2) Bij indicates the benefit of the garment maker i from design. It is worthy to note that the abovementioned analytical model could derive out the total surplus, yet the corresponding pairing is probably not stable due to that there exists double marginalization effect in some pairs (i, j) In such a context, we give the following equilibrium conditions under which garment makers and designers can match with stable final pairing: VC D i∗, j∗ ≥ VC D i, j∗ +VGM i, j∗ − VGM(i, j),. Garment maker i∗ has no motivation to change the present pairing
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