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This paper aims to solve a mining work centralization problem using a gamification-based approach.

The authors have developed a simple blockchain application that incorporates a gamification concept into the mining work. Then, they asked some participants in an experiment to use the application for a week and gathered some insights from the responses on questionnaires.

The results show that the gamification-based approach distributed mining work among many participants by increasing their motivation to participate mining work.

The gamification-based approach solves a mining work centralization problem and opens a new direction for future blockchain technologies.

The motivation to participate in crowdsourcing (CS) platforms is an emerging challenge. Although researchers and practitioners have focused on crowd motivation in the past, the results obtained through such practices have not been satisfactory. Researchers have left unexplored research areas related to CS pillars, such as the evolution of the crowd’s primary motivations, seekers applying effective policies and incentives, platform design challenges and addressing task complexity using the synchronicity of the crowd. Researchers are now more inclined to address these issues by focusing on sustaining the crowd’s motivation; however, sustaining the crowd’s motivation has many challenges.

To fill this gap, this study conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to investigate and map the challenges and factors affecting sustained motivation during CS with the overcoming implications. Studies that satisfied the inclusion criteria were published between 2010 and 2021.

Important sustainable factors are extracted using the grounded theory that has sustained participation and the factors' cohesion leads to the identification of challenges that the pillars of CS face. Crowds being the most vital part of CS contests face the challenge of engagement. The results reported the factors that affect the crowd’s primary and post-intentions, perceived value of incentives and social and communal interaction. Seekers face the challenge of knowledge and understanding; the results identify the reason behind the crowd’s demotivation and the impact of theories and factors on the crowd's psychological needs which helped in sustaining participation. Similarly, the platforms face the challenge of being successful and demanding, the results identify the latest technologies, designs and features that seekers proclaim and need the platforms designer's attention. The identified task challenges are completion and achievement; the authors have identified the impact of trait of task and solving mechanisms that have sustained participation.

The study identifies, explores and summarizes the challenges on CS pillars researchers are facing now to sustain contributions by keeping participants motivated during online campaigns. Similarly, the study highlights the implication to overcome the challenges by identifying and prioritizing the areas concerning sustainability through the adoption of innovative methods or policies that can guarantee sustained participation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing quick cash by crowd in agri-food crowdfunding campaigns; this paper utilizes prospect theory to analyze the value and weighting functions of the crowd's cash.

Using samples of crowdfunding campaigns launched in the Zhongchou (www.Zhongchou.cn) platform's agriculture and food category, this paper employs a multivariate linear regression model to investigate factors that motivate the crowd to make quick investment decisions.

The results demonstrate that lowering the investment threshold, improving publicity, and increasing the benefits of a campaign can increase the decision weight assigned to a campaign, thereby motivating the crowd to make quick investment decisions. Improving the product's reputation, enhancing campaign promotion, and diversifying the reward scheme can increase the crowd's expected value of the campaign – another motivation for a quicker cash decision.

This paper can help initiators, platforms and regulators better fulfil their roles in promoting the rapid, healthy development of crowdfunding in the agri-food industry, especially in the context of the Chinese launch of significant initiatives to develop crowdfunding aimed at rural e-commerce and poverty alleviation.

This paper extends the behavioral finance concept of prospect theory to agri-food crowdfunding campaigns and investigates factors that motivate the crowd to make quick investment decisions. Additionally, this paper demonstrates that the backers of crowdfunding are not perfectly rational and can be motivated to invest by increasing mean decision weight and expected value of a campaign.

Cruising is one of the industries most susceptible to the current COVID-19 health crisis, due to the closed environment and the contacts between cruisers and crewmembers. This study aims to understand if the perceived crowding and the health risk perception related to the pandemic situation might threaten passengers’ intentions to cruise. The study also examines corporate reputation and trust, as well as social motivation and self-confidence, as possible predictors of consumers’ intention to cruise.

The study is based on the development of a structured questionnaire submitted online via social media. Overall, 553 individuals’ responses were used for understanding the factors that can affect consumers’ intention to cruise by performing several regression models.

The results show that the perceived crowding related to the pandemic does not seem to influence people’s intention to cruise. On the contrary, trust in the cruise company, corporate reputation, cruisers’ self-confidence and research of social motivation are positive predictors of intention to cruise, thus reducing the perceived risk’s deterring impact. The importance of such factors differs in respect of repeat and not repeat cruisers.

The study presents several managerial implications as it analyses the variables that could help cruise management cope better with COVID-19’s negative impact.

Despite the severity of COVID-19’s impact on the cruise industry, no studies have yet focussed on how the current pandemic situation may influence customers’ intention to cruise in the future.

The study aims to explore language style and gender match as a key part of initial trust among potential donors and how this leads to funding success based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories. Empirical analyses of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

Crowdfunding (CF) is an internet-based method of funding employed by project founders, allowing individuals to raise funds from the crowd to support their projects. It is important for project founders to attract the crowd’s interest as potential funders commonly have limited information about projects. One of the early cues about a project that can be picked up by the crowd in CF projects is the text description of the proposal. This text description is crucial for giving the crowd an understanding of the project and for promoting the crowd’s trust in the founder, encouraging them to fund the CF project. Based on the similarity attraction and homophily theories, this study sets out to explore language style and gender match as key elements of initial trust among potential donors and how they lead to funding success. A 2 × 2 factorial experimental design (e.g. subject, male and female, × male language style and female language style) was used for the study. To determine the sample size of the experiment, this study applied power and sample size estimations to measure how many respondents were needed for the experiment. Based on the power table of effect size, 128 respondents were considered to be a sufficient number for this experiment to ensure sufficient statistical power of 0.8 and a significance level of 0.05. This study fulfilled the requirement by recruiting 160 respondents, which corresponded to 40 subjects per group based on a 2 × 2 factorial design (the respondents’ gender, male and female, and text language style, male and female). The empirical analysis of 160 respondents revealed that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than “who has written it” (gender).

This paper contributes to project founders’ understanding and knowledge of the importance of linguistic style, which can determine the success of a CF project. One of the important results of this study is that the crowd can identify the author’s gender based on their writing style. Through an experiment applying factorial analysis (2 × 2), it was found that people are more concerned about “how it is written” (language style) than with “who it is written by” (gender). This means that the project founder, if they know who their audience is, should know how to write the project proposal so that it fits the audience’s preferences. More specifically, the success rate of CF projects can be increased by integrating suitable word dimensions in promotions of projects on CF platforms. Therefore, it can be argued that linguistic style is a powerful agent for building a connection with a target audience. The findings of this study can be used as theoretical guidance, and eventually, the potential antecedents of funding intention can be further explored.

This study is subject to several limitations. The result is limited to donation-based CF. As this study focuses on the language style of project founders when they describe their CF projects, donation-based CF was the most appropriate platform for this research. In donation-based CF, the style words are more emotion-based, compared to other CF platforms. The experiment, however, could also be replicated for other CF types such as reward-based CF. One important part of CF projects is persuading the crowd to fund them. It is worth mentioning that reward-based CF involves individuals pledging to a business in exchange for a reward. Yet, even though reward-based CF offers rewards, it is generally considered a subset of donation-based CF because there is no financial return to the backer. Therefore, it is suggested that future research should also consider case studies in reward-based CF. Second, from the persuading perspective, this study focusses on narrative language style only, as it facilitates the crowd’s understanding of a CF project. Future study can further focus on other information content such as videos in the project proposal. Prior research has found that providing a video in a CF project increases the crowd’s confidence in funding (Mitra, 2012). The study is also supported by previous studies that suggest producing a higher quality of video in the project proposal positively related to the success of CF projects (Mollick (2014)).

The result of this study empirically confirmed that the crowd’s willingness to fund a project proposal and their trust are dependent on the text description of the project proposal. The project founders need to know how to describe the content of a project so that it signals the quality of the project, especially in early start-ups. In other words, the way that a project is created and published through a CF platform will send a valuable signal to the potential donors about the project, and they will either find it acceptable or reject it. If the project appears to lack demand among potential donors, it is easier for project founders to quickly identify that the project will fail, without the need to invest additional capital.

The findings of this study have important social implications that provide guidelines for project founders on establishing a strategy to help the crowd understand their projects. At the same time, the findings can help the crowd to make their funding decisions. First, the text language used in the CF project by the project founder plays an important role in presenting the campaign and all the ideas need to be presented in a clear way so that the crowd understands the project. In CF projects, pitch is everything (Varsamis, 2018). The pitch refers to the text or video that is provided by the project founder to show their project proposal to the crowd. Compared with traditional funding channels (such as venture capital, i.e. banks), CF is more convenient for raising funds. This is because the project founders need to show their ideas in a creative way to the crowd online, rather than preparing a complex plan and racking their brains on how they can persuade investors to participate (Wang and Yang (2019)). This research intends to help project founders understand how they can influence the crowd by improving the text language used in their CF projects.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study how the linguistic style of the project founder would lead to the success rate of crowdfunding projects.

This paper examines a key event in the life of Chester Barnard, a “riot of the unemployed” in Trenton, New Jersey in 1935 when Barnard was director of the state Emergency Relief Administration. In a later influential lecture at Harvard, Barnard used the incident to support the ideas of the Harvard human relations group that recognition and dignity were more powerful motivators than money and fear. Contemporary newspaper accounts show that the rioters were motivated more strongly by monetary concerns than Barnard admitted. Barnard was misled by the ideology of the Harvard human relations group to underestimate the importance of power and money, an underestimation that may still be important today, given his continuing influence. That a man of Barnard’s integrity was misled by his ideology is grounds for us in our time to maintain some humility as to the extent of our managerial knowledge.

Over the past decade, many research works in various disciplines have benefited from the endless ocean of people and their potentials (in the form of crowdsourcing) as an effective problem-solving strategy and computational model. But nothing interesting is ever completely one-sided. Therefore, when it comes to leveraging people's power, as the dark side of crowdsourcing, there are some possible threats that have not been considered as should be, such as recruiting black hat crowdworkers for organizing targeted adversarial intentions. The purpose of this paper is to draw more attention to this critical issue through investigation of its different aspects.

To delve into details of such malicious intentions, the related literature and previous researches have been studied. Then, four major typologies for adversarial crowdsourced attacks as well as some real-world scenarios are discussed and delineated. Finally, possible future threats are introduced.

Despite many works on adversarial crowdsourcing, there are only a few specific research studies devoted to considering the issue in the context of cyber security. In this regard, the proposed typologies (and addressed scenarios) for such human-mediated attacks can shed light on the way of identifying and confronting such threats.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this the first work in which the titular topic is investigated in detail. Due to popularity and efficiency of leveraging crowds' intelligence and efforts in a wide range of application domains, it is most likely that adversarial human-driven intentions gain more attention. In this regard, it is anticipated that the present research study can serve as a roadmap for proposing defensive mechanisms to cope with such diverse threats.

The aim of this chapter is to argue that charisma is a collective representation, and that charismatic authority is a social status that derives more from the “recognition” of the followers than from the “magnetism” of the leaders. I contend further that a close reading of Max Weber shows that he, too, saw charisma in this light.

I develop my argument by a close reading of many of the most relevant texts on the subject. This includes not only the renowned texts on this subject by Max Weber, but also many books and articles that interpret or criticize Weber’s views.

I pay exceptionally close attention to key arguments and texts, several of which have been overlooked in the past.

Writers for whom charisma is personal magnetism tend to assume that charismatic rule is natural and that the full realization of democratic norms is unlikely. Authority, in this view, emanates from rulers unbound by popular constraint. I argue that, in fact, authority draws both its mandate and its energy from the public, and that rulers depend on the loyalty of their subjects, which is never assured. So charismatic claimants are dependent on popular choice, not vice versa.

I advocate a “culturalist” interpretation of Weber, which runs counter to the dominant “personalist” account. Conventional interpreters, under the sway of theology or mass psychology, misread Weber as a romantic, for whom charisma is primal and undemocratic rule is destiny. This essay offers a counter-reading.

This study furthers one’s understanding of the motivations of the crowdfunding crowd by empirically examining critical factors that influence the crowd's decision to support a crowdfunding project.

Backer's comments from a sample of the top 100 most funded technology product projects on KickStarter were collected. A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) analysis strategy was adopted to investigate critical motivational factors. Three experts mapped those factors to the known theoretical constructs of social exchange theory (SET).

Although backers are motivated by value, they are also motivated by far less tangible social factors including trust and a feeling of psychological ownership. Findings suggest that the crowd is far more than a passive group of investors or customers and should be viewed as participatory stakeholders. This study serves as guidance for project owners hoping to motivate the crowd and for future investigators examining backer motivations in other types of crowdsourcing projects.

Online chatter in the form of user-generated comments is an excellent data source for researchers to mine for value and meaning.

Given strong feelings of psychological ownership, project owners should actively engage the crowd and solicit the crowd for advice and help in order to motivate them.

The study presents the first empirical exploration of backer motivations using LDA guided by theory and the knowledge of experts. A framework of latent motivational factors is proposed.

In his inauguration speech of 1961, John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic and youngest-ever holder of the office of US President, famously exhorted citizens to ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’ At the time, few would have interpreted this as a call for open innovation or even citizen crowdsourcing: neither the language nor the architecture then existed for either. But the sentiment he expressed marked the beginning of a campaign of citizen engagement in developing ideas for government. It was, in effect, the first national exhortation for the crowdsourcing of ideas, and Kennedy’s words have subsequently been adapted by Jeff Howe for the modern crowdsourcing context.

Citizen crowdsourcing is now well-established. This chapter sets out to assess how successful it has been as a mechanism for finessing original and meaningful ideas that advance social goals. We look briefly at leading examples of crowdsourcing for social good. We also look at the underlying factors that support it, including the knowledge and input solicited from the crowd; the crowd’s willingness to participate; and the mechanisms through which the crowd can engage. We trace the idea and practice of crowdsourcing back to Socrates in ancient Athens. We look at prosocial behaviour, exploring selected annals of public intellectuals, including Emerson. We examine citizen science as a forerunner of crowdsourcing, then move into the business strategy of open innovation and, finally, we arrive at crowdsourcing for social good in various guises. In conclusion, we explore what has been learned from initiatives that can now be considered current best practice in this area.