The influence of diversity and experience on the effects of crowd size

Abstract

One advantage of crowds over traditional teams is that crowds enable the assembling of a large number of individuals to address problems. The literature is unclear, however, about when crowd size leads to better outcomes. To better understand the effects of crowd size we conducted a study on the retention and performance of 4,317 articles in the WikiProject Film community. Results indicate that crowd composition, specifically diversity and experience, is vital to understanding when size leads to better retention and performance. Crowd size was positively related to retention and performance when crowds were high in diversity and experience. Retention was important to determining when crowd size led to better performance. Crowd size was positively related to performance when retention was low. Our results suggest that crowds benefit from their size when they are diverse, experienced, and have low retention rates.

Crowd characteristics and crowd wisdom: Evidence from an online investment community

“…Arazy and Nov () found no significant impact of group size on the quality of a Wikipedia article and argue that the impact of group size on quality is moderated by various effects on inequality and coordination. Crowd diversity (Robert Jr & Romero, ; Robert & Romero, ) and crowd experience (Robert Jr & Romero, ) are found to moderate the influence of crowd size on crowd performance. Wikipedia crowds obtain benefit from their crowd size when they are diverse, experienced, and have low retention rates (Robert Jr & Romero, ).…”

“…Crowd diversity (Robert Jr & Romero, ; Robert & Romero, ) and crowd experience (Robert Jr & Romero, ) are found to moderate the influence of crowd size on crowd performance. Wikipedia crowds obtain benefit from their crowd size when they are diverse, experienced, and have low retention rates (Robert Jr & Romero, ). Different from existing studies, which are mainly focused on the direct effect of crowd size on crowd performance, our study examines its moderating effect between crowd characteristics and crowd performance.…”

“…Crowd members' social network (that is, communication pattern) was also found to influence OSS development (Singh et al, ; Temizkan & Kumar, ; Wu et al, ). Robert and Romero () found Wikipedia crowd benefits from their crowd size when they are diverse, experienced, and have low retention rates. Arazy et al () found that an increasing crowd size and author‐based diversity helped improve Wikipedia content quality.…”

“…For example, online crowds can be used to develop innovative solutions (Han & Nickerson, 2015;Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2013) and make predictions as well (Budescu & Chen, 2015). However, existing studies related to online crowd performance mainly focus on crowdsourcing communities related to product development such as OSS (Singh et al, 2011;Temizkan & Kumar, 2015;Vasilescu et al, 2015;Wu et al, 2007) and Wikipedia (Arazy et al, 2006;Kittur & Kraut, 2008;Robert Jr & Romero, 2017). Very little attention has been paid to communities related to prediction making.…”

“…However, very few studies have empirically investigated the crowd characteristics that contribute to a wise crowd in the stock prediction domain. Besides, existing studies related to online crowd performance are mainly focused on crowd-innovation tasks, such as Open Source Software (OSS) (Singh, Tan, & Mookerjee, 2011;Temizkan & Kumar, 2015;Vasilescu et al, 2015;Wu, Goh, & Tang, 2007) or Wikipedia (Arazy, Morgan, & Patterson, 2006;Kittur & Kraut, 2008;Robert Jr & Romero, 2017). In this study, we will focus on the impact of crowd characteristics on crowd performance for prediction tasks in OICs.…”