The Nonlinear Impact of Task Rewards and Duration on Solvers’ Participation Behavior: A Study on Online Crowdsourcing Platform

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has attracted significant attention in the past decade because it has more competitive advantages than traditional methods for mobilizing distributed labor and utilizing innovation. Crowdsourcing contests are one of the most popular and effective crowdsourcing modes. Reasonable task rewards and duration are the key factors for seekers to attract solvers who can efficiently participate in the crowdsourcing contest task. Previous studies have mainly focused on task results to analyze solvers’ participation behavior in crowdsourcing contests, but have paid little attention to the task process, and there have been conflicting conclusions regarding the impact of task rewards and duration on solvers’ participation behavior and the performance of crowdsourcing contests. In view of this gap, this study collected 2706 logo design task data points from 2015–2017 on an online crowdsourcing platform and measured the performance of solvers’ participation behavior in two stages. The participation time was used to represent the performance of solvers’ participation behavior in the task process, while the number of submissions of solutions was used to represent the performance of participation behavior in the task result. The results show that task rewards and duration have an inverted U-shaped effect on the number of submissions, money rewards have a positive impact on participation time, and duration has an inverted U-shaped relationship with participation time. This study proposes the nonlinear effects of task rewards and duration on participation behavior and explains the reason for the conflicting results of previous studies. This paper also expands upon existing research by using solvers’ participation time in the task process to measure the performance of solvers’ participation behavior.

Do Dynamic Signals Affect High-Quality Solvers’ Participation Behavior? Evidence from the Crowdsourcing Platform

“…As time increases, high-quality solvers have higher time costs. Increased competition and costs reduce the participation of high-quality solvers [59].…”

The impact of task description linguistic style on task performance: a text mining of crowdsourcing contests

“…This research identifies linguistic styles whose use in task descriptions affects performance in crowdsourcing contests. Previous studies have often focused on the easily quantifiable factors that influence task performance, such as task rewards (Li and Hu, 2017; Yang and Qi, 2021), task duration (Dipalantino and Vojnovic, 2009), task density (Shao et al , 2012), market price (Yang et al , 2009) and task communication (Wooten and Ulrich, 2017). There has been little research on the characteristics of task descriptions.…”

“…The quantity and quality of submissions are closely related to solvers' knowledge, experience, participation, enthusiasm and effort (Sun et al , 2015), all of which are influenced by task settings. Thus, scholars have studied task setting factors that influence task performance, such as task rewards (Li and Hu, 2017; Yang and Qi, 2021), task duration (Dipalantino and Vojnovic, 2009), task description (Gefen et al , 2016), task density (Shao et al , 2012), market price (Yang et al , 2009) and task communication (Wooten and Ulrich, 2017).…”

Exploring Gamification for Live-Streaming Shopping—Influence of Reward, Competition, Presence and Immersion on Purchase Intention

“…It is noted that there are connections among rewards, competition and behavior [15]. If the reward increases then the competition offen becomes more intense in a crowdsourcing contest environment [40]. Kumari and Barge [41] claim that a loyalty-based reward program can enhance employees' internal competition and motivation, thus positively affecting their performance.…”