IMCA Seminar - Reto Hofstetter - room A14 - 13:30
Institute of Marketing and Communication Management
Start date: 1 December 2011
End date: 2 December 2011
Repeated Crowdsourcing Contests - Impact of Reward-System and Problem-Type over Timeby
Marketers are increasingly tapping into their customer base through crowdsourcing contests. Such contests offer the opportunity to get ideas for new offerings, innovative marketing campaigns, or new concepts or designs for advertising material at low cost. As this practice has proven to be successful, firms are repeatedly encouraging their customers to participate in such contests. While literature can guide firms in optimally designing single-round crowdsourcing contest, little is known about the effect of contest-design on repeated participation and performance of solvers. In this study, we investigate repeated contests using data from a field experiment and a large scale secondary dataset from one of the leading crowdsourcing platforms. We find that the reward system has a great influence on solvers self-selection in repeated contests. While initially suboptimal, providing rewards to many solvers outperforms the winner-takes-all reward system already in the second round. However, this finding might only apply in cases where the problem-type of the contest remains similar over time. If the problem-type changes over time, we do not find evidence for a positive effect on contest outcome by encouraging previous top performers.
