Abstract
Solvers’ wide and continuous participation is imperative for the sustainable development of online crowdsourcing platforms (OCPs). Prior studies have deeply investigated what and how solvers’ motives and demographics, task attributes, requester attributes, and platform designs influence solvers’ participation. However, to our knowledge, few studies concentrated on what these OCPs do for solvers in practices that are concerned with solvers and thus influence their decision to participate. To fill this gap, this study conducted a content analysis of 25 typical OCPs focusing on problem-solving contests to identify service measures that they presented for solvers. Consequently, 14 major service measures that are related to contest management, solver management, and requester management were identified. Thereafter, we discussed the roles of these service measures in solvers’ participation. They are activating solvers to participate, providing solvers opportunities to participate, and supporting solvers to participate. Our analysis, on the one hand, presents a comprehensive list of service measures for solvers distributed on these OCPs separately and on the other hand aids the OCPs to improve their solver service and for solvers to compare and analyze their preferred OCPs as a reference.
Highlights
Eusebio ScornavaccaCrowdsourcing is a kind of participative online activity in which a large and possibly undefined group of people contribute to the tasks outsourced by requesters through a flexible open call [1]
Our analysis offers a comprehensive list of measures for serving solvers by conducting a content analysis of the online crowdsourcing platforms (OCPs)
This study concentrated on OCPs for problem-solving contests and identified their service measures for solvers
Summary
Crowdsourcing is a kind of participative online activity in which a large and possibly undefined group of people contribute to the tasks outsourced by requesters through a flexible open call [1]. Inspired by the financial or non-financial benefits, there is a popular trend for firms or individuals to apply and for solvers to make use of crowdsourcing to handle different possible outsourced tasks, especially problem-solving tasks [2,3,4]. In respect to problem-solving tasks, contest is an extremely widely adopted crowdsourcing form for addressing them [5,6]. A large number of online crowdsourcing platforms (OCPs) supporting problem-solving contests have been developed and grown rapidly, such as Hyve, Designcrowd, 99design, and GoPillar. Millions of solvers around the world have conducted activities on these OCPs and millions of dollars have been transferred from requesters to solvers [5].
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