Does the Opinion of the Crowd Predict Commercial Success? Evidence from Threadless

Abstract

Crowdsourcing new products involves an open call for creative ideas. To select among submissions, crowdsourcing portals ask the community (the “crowd”) to voice its opinion. Does the voice of the crowd predict the commercial success of a new product? This is an open question because over a half a century of research in consumer behavior is inconclusive on how peoples’ expressed attitudes predict their behavior. We study this question on a pioneering crowdsourcing portal, Threadless.com. We collect and examine a large-scale dataset tracking about 150,000 designs from 45,000 designers that received almost 150 million votes from 600,000 users between 2004 and 2010. We find that the counts of positive and neutral votes are consistent predictors of sales. However, the count of negative votes is an inconsistent predictor of sales – more negative votes is associated with higher sales from the users who cast the votes, but lower sales from the users who did not cast the votes. These findings are consistent with u...