Selection of crowdsourcing formats: simultaneous contest vs sequential contest
Industrial Management & Data Systems
ISSN: 0263-5577
Article publication date: 19 October 2018
Issue publication date: 8 February 2019
Abstract
Purpose
The online crowdsourcing has been widely applied in the practice. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the all-pay auction contest in crowdsourcing, wherein a seeker posts a task online and the solvers decide whether to participate in the contest and in what extent to spend efforts on their submissions.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors specifically consider two classic contest formats: simultaneous contest and sequential contest, depending on whether the solver can observe the prior solvers’ submissions before making her own effort investment decision or not. They derive both seeker’s and solver’s equilibrium decisions and payoffs under different contest formats, and show that they vary significantly according to the number and the average skill level of solvers.
Findings
The results show that a solver would always invest more on her submission under simultaneous contest than under sequential contest, as she cannot confirm how other solvers’ submissions would be. This subsequently intensifies the market competition and brings down a solver’s average payoff under simultaneous contest. Although the simultaneous contest gives rise to a higher expected highest quality of all submissions, it also requires the seeker to spend more search cost to identify the best submission. Therefore, when the number of solvers is high or the average skill level is low, the seeker prefers sequential contest to simultaneous contest. The results also show an analogous preference over two formats for the platform.
Originality/value
This paper investigates two formats of all-pay auction contest in crowdsourcing and evaluates them from the perspective of solvers, seekers and platforms, respectively. The research offers many interesting insights which do not only explain the incentive mechanisms for solvers under different contest formats, but also make meaningful contributions to the seeker’s or the platform’s adoption strategies between two alternative contest formats in crowdsourcing practice.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors sincerely thank the department editor, Alain Chong, the senior editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions that improve the paper. The authors have also benefited from the support of National Natural Science Foundation of China (71871167, 71472069, 71402126, 71471141).
Citation
Deng, W., Guan, X., Ma, S. and Liu, S. (2019), "Selection of crowdsourcing formats: simultaneous contest vs sequential contest", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 119 No. 1, pp. 35-53. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-09-2017-0433
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited