Abstract
A crowdsourcing contest is one of the most popular modes of crowdsourcing and is also an important tool for an enterprise to implement open innovation. The solvers’ active participation is one of the major reasons for the success of crowdsourcing contests. Research on solvers’ participation behavior is helpful in understanding the sustainability and incentives of solvers’ participation in the online crowdsourcing platform. So, how to attract more solvers to participate and put in more effort is the focus of researchers. In this regard, previous studies mainly used the submission quantity to measure solvers’ participation behavior and lacked an effective measure on the degree of participation effort expended by a solver. For the first time, we use solvers’ participation time as a dependent variable to measure their effort in a crowdsourcing contest. Thus, we incorporate participation time into the solver’s participation research. With the data from Taskcn.com, we analyze how participation time is affected four key factors including task design, task description, task process, and environment, respectively. We found that, first, for task design, higher task rewards will attract solvers to invest more time in the participation process and the relationship between participation time and task duration is inverted U-shaped. Second, for task description, the length of the task description has a negative impact on participation time and the task description attachment will positively influence the participation time. Third, for the task process, communication and supplementary explanations in a crowdsourcing process positively affect participation time. Fourth, for environmental factors, the task density of the crowdsourcing platform and the market price of all crowdsourcing contests have respectively negative and positive effects on participation time.
Highlights
Crowdsourcing is the act of an enterprise that outsources the work traditionally performed by internal employees through an online public call to an uncertain group of people without clear boundaries [1]
Walter and Back [10] used the average quality of solutions and the number of solutions to measure the performance of a crowdsourcing contest and they examined the impact of rewards, duration, and the length of task description on the performance of the crowdsourcing contest
Liang et al [33] studied how intrinsic and extrinsic motivation affects solvers’ participation effort in crowdsourcing contests and found that there is a negative adjustment between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, indicating that when the level of extrinsic motivation is higher, the effect of intrinsic motivation on the task will be diminished and extrinsic incentives actively adjust the relationship between participation motivation and effort
Summary
Crowdsourcing is the act of an enterprise that outsources the work traditionally performed by internal employees through an online public call to an uncertain group of people without clear boundaries [1]. Walter and Back [10] used the average quality of solutions and the number of solutions to measure the performance of a crowdsourcing contest and they examined the impact of rewards, duration, and the length of task description on the performance of the crowdsourcing contest. According to the existing research, the number of submissions is used to measure solvers’ participation behavior in most research and the research on the participation time is relatively limited If any, they only do the research from the perspective of solvers and study how participation time affects the probability of winning. The number of submissions reflects the number of solvers who decide to participate in a crowdsourcing contest and the participation time reflects the degree of the solvers’ participation effort They hope for more solvers and various solutions from which to choose. For the first time, we used participation time as the dependent variable to measure the level of participation effort of the solvers and to analyze the factors that affect solvers’ participation time
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