The impact of contest attributes on solvers’ participation and performance in crowdsourcing contests

• Autor(a) principal: Kutschera, Fabian
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/20771
• topic: Crowdsourcing; Open innovation; Innovation; Contest elements; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Crowdsourcing contests as a means to leverage the knowledge of external individuals to solve firms’ innovation problems are growing in popularity. Little research has been de-voted to the question how such contests should be ideally designed in order to achieve a high level of participation and high quality solutions. By analysing a data set of 913 soft-ware engineering contests from the platform TopCoder, this study investigates the impli-cations of three particular contest elements: the number of participants, the monetary award and the problem description. The results confirm the theoretic model, stating that a large number of participants is preferable for a seeker (firm) and outweighs the arising disadvantage of lowered efforts of solvers due to a greater competition. This theoretic discussion was enriched by the finding of a curvilinear relationship between the number of solvers and the contest’s performance, wherefore adding contestants is only beneficial until a certain level. Furthermore, results show that a high monetary award captures more participants but leads to a lower contest performance, which is contrary to prior research. Regarding the problem description, it was shown that a short problem description in-creases participation and improves the contest performance whereas a problem descrip-tion, which includes URL links to other homepages, reduces participation but improves a contest’s best solution. By understanding the outcomes of this study, firms better under-stand how to design crowdsourcing contests.