Motivating the Established, Deterring the NewwThe Divergent Effect of Platform Competition on Member Contributions in Digital Mapping Communities

Nagaraj, Abhishek; Piezunka, Henning

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3043095

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 83 publications

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“…Particularly helpful for our study is that research in this domain has differentiated between the motivations of newcomers and established contributors (Chen, Harper, Konstan & Xin Li, 2010;Halfaker et al, 2011;Morgan, Bouterse, Walls & Stierch, 2013;Shah, 2006), identifying and emphasizing newcomers' particular characteristics. Scholars have examined motivations to contribute to various kinds of endeavors, including idea crowdsourcing (Bayus, 2013;Dahlander & Piezunka, 2014;Deichmann & Jensen, 2018;Deichmann & van den Ende, 2014), technical support groups (Moon & Sproull, 2008), free and open-source software (Greenstein & Zhu, 2012;Lerner & Tirole, 2002;Nagle, 2018), and knowledge platforms (Nagaraj & Piezunka, 2018;Nov, 2007).…”

Section: Contributors' Willingness To Engage In the Crowdsourcing Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

Idea Rejected, Tie Formed: Organizations’ Feedback on Crowdsourced Ideas

Piezunka

Dahlander

2019

AMJ

Self Cite

112

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When organizations crowdsource ideas, they select only a small share of the ideas that contributors submit for implementation. If a contributor submits an idea to an organization for the first time (i.e., newcomer), and the organization does not select the idea, this may negatively affect the newcomer's relationship with the organization and willingness to submit ideas to the organization in the future. We suggest that organizations can increase newcomers' willingness to submit further ideas by providing a thus far understudied form of feedback: rejections. Though counterintuitive, we suggest that rejections encourage newcomers to bond with an organization. Rejections signal contributors that an organization is interested in both receiving their ideas and developing relationships with them. To test our theory, we examine the crowdsourcing of 70,159 organizations that receive ideas from 1,336,154 contributors. Using text analysis, we examine differences in how rejections are written to disentangle the mechanisms through which rejections affect contributors' willingness to continue to interact with an organization. We find that receiving a rejection has a positive effect on newcomers' willingness to submit ideas in the future. This effect is stronger if the rejection includes an explanation and is particularly pronounced if the explanation accompanying the rejection matches the original idea in terms of linguistic style.Acknowledgments: Both authors contributed equally. We thank David Kelley, founder and former CEO of IDEO, who encouraged us to study rejections to understand how organizations handle ideas that they do not select for implementation. We appreciate constructive comments from

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Section: Contributors' Willingness To Engage In the Crowdsourcing Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

Idea Rejected, Tie Formed: Organizations’ Feedback on Crowdsourced Ideas

Piezunka

Dahlander

2019

AMJ

Self Cite

112

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“…We build on the foundations of prior research on the formation of platform–complementor relationships, which predominantly studies formal mechanisms (e.g., Hagiu, 2006), by identifying informal antecedents of complementor support, that is, social learning and social coordination. We thus contribute to an emerging stream of work that takes a socially embedded view of complementor behavior (Boudreau & Jeppesen, 2015; Eckhardt, 2016; Mollick, 2016; Nagaraj & Piezunka, 2018). We advance a novel methodology for studying platform–complementor relationships by demonstrating one way to use open‐source code to study developers longitudinally (Baldwin, Maccormack, & Rusnak, 2014; Polidoro & Yang, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Platform diffusion at temporary gatherings: Social coordination and ecosystem emergence

Fang

Clough

2020

Strategic Management Journal

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Research Summary Software platforms create value by cultivating an ecosystem of complementary products and services. Existing explanations for how a prospective complementor chooses platforms to join assume the complementor has rich information about the range of available platforms. However, complementors lack this information in many ecosystems, raising the question of how complementors learn about platforms in the first place. We investigate whether attending a temporary gathering—a hackathon—impacts the platform choices of software developers. Through a large‐scale quantitative study of 1,302 developers and 167 hackathons, supported by qualitative research, we analyze the multiple channels—sponsorship, social learning, knowledge exchange, and social coordination—through which hackathons serve as a social forum for the diffusion of platform adoption among attendees. Managerial Summary A software platform such as Windows, iOS, or Amazon Web Services relies on third‐party developers to create applications that complement the platform and make it valuable for end users. However, developers face a wide range of possible platforms, and they may have limited information about which platforms would be worthwhile to develop for. A software platform business can educate and encourage developers to adopt their platform by supporting in‐person software development competitions, known as hackathons. Developers learn about prospective platforms that advertise at the hackathon. Developers also learn whether and how to use a platform by observing and teaching one other. Hackathons are particularly useful for spreading platform technologies: developers prefer to adopt widely used platforms, and hackathons permit developers to identify and join fashionable platforms.

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“…Finally, it is interesting to consider the nature of maps when mapmakers that do not enforce copyright, such as nonprofits or crowdsourcing communities, face competition from commercial providers who do. Nagaraj and Piezunka (2018) study crowdsourced, open maps on the OpenStreetMap platform and find that such maps are likely to look different in the presence of commercial competition as compared to cases when they are the only such platform in town. By examining how OpenStreetMap contributors respond to the entry of Google Maps in different countries around the world, they show that commercial competition causes casual mapmakers to stop contributing, while already established volunteers increase contributions.…”

Section: Competition and Intellectual Propertymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Economics of Maps

Nagaraj

Stern

2020

Journal of Economic Perspectives

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For centuries, maps have codified the extent of human geographic knowledge and shaped discovery and economic decision-making. Economists across many fields, including urban economics, public finance, political economy, and economic geography, have long employed maps, yet have largely abstracted away from exploring the economic determinants and consequences of maps as a subject of independent study. In this essay, we first review and unify recent literature in a variety of different fields that highlights the economic and social consequences of maps, along with an overview of the modern geospatial industry. We then outline our economic framework in which a given map is the result of economic choices around map data and designs, resulting in variations in private and social returns to mapmaking. We highlight five important economic and institutional factors shaping mapmakers’ data and design choices. Our essay ends by proposing that economists pay more attention to the endogeneity of mapmaking and the resulting consequences for economic and social welfare.

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Motivating the Established, Deterring the NewwThe Divergent Effect of Platform Competition on Member Contributions in Digital Mapping Communities

Cited by 5 publications

References 83 publications

Idea Rejected, Tie Formed: Organizations’ Feedback on Crowdsourced Ideas

Idea Rejected, Tie Formed: Organizations’ Feedback on Crowdsourced Ideas

Platform diffusion at temporary gatherings: Social coordination and ecosystem emergence

The Economics of Maps

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