Joint vs. Separate Crowdsourcing Contests

76 Pages Posted: 6 Jan 2017 Last revised: 13 Apr 2020

See all articles by Ming Hu

Ming Hu

University of Toronto - Rotman School of Management

Lu Wang

Shanghai University of Finance and Economics - College of Business

Date Written: april 11, 2020

Abstract

In a crowdsourcing contest, innovation is outsourced by a firm to an open crowd that competes in generating innovative solutions. Given that the projects typically consist of multiple attributes, how should the firm optimally design a crowdsourcing contest for such a project? We consider two alternative mechanisms. One is a joint contest, where the best solution is chosen from the joint solutions submitted by all contestants. The other is multiple separate sub-contests, with each dedicated to one attribute and the contestants asked to build upon the best work in progress from previous sub-contests or to compete in parallel sub-contests. It is intuitive that the separate contest has the advantage of potentially creating a "cooperative" final solution contributed by different contestants. However, somewhat surprisingly, we show that the separate contest may reduce the incentive for the crowd to exert effort, resulting in the joint contest becoming the optimal scheme. The comparison of the expected best performances in the two contests depends on the project's characteristics. For example, if contestants' performances have a sufficiently high (resp., low) level of randomness, the separate (resp., joint) contest is optimal. If the number of contestants is large (resp., small) enough, the separate (resp., joint) contest is optimal. Moreover, we find that when the prize is endogenized, the optimal amount of prize in the joint contest is no less than that in the separate contest. Finally, we extend the model to account for contestants with heterogeneous types.

Keywords: crowdsourcing contest, tournament design, multiple attributes, prize allocation

JEL Classification: D82, D44

Suggested Citation

Hu, Ming and Wang, Lu, Joint vs. Separate Crowdsourcing Contests (april 11, 2020). Rotman School of Management Working Paper No. 2892683, Forthcoming, Management Science, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2892683 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2892683

Ming Hu

University of Toronto - Rotman School of Management ( email )

105 St. George st
Toronto, ON M5S 3E6
Canada
416-946-5207 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://ming.hu

Lu Wang (Contact Author)

Shanghai University of Finance and Economics - College of Business ( email )

777 Guoding Road
Shanghai, 200433
China

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
599
Abstract Views
3,432
Rank
82,606
PlumX Metrics