Exploring the Impact of Task Density on Task Submission in Crowdsourcing Contests

Abstract

The competitive environment has a certain impact on the solvers' participation in the crowdsourcing contests. We Used the task density to represent the competitive environment, and the quantity of submitted solutions to represent the solvers' participation. Among them, the task density refers to the number of similar tasks in a certain period of time. The more similar tasks in a certain period of time, the greater the task density, indicating that there are more similar tasks to attract the solvers. Using the 2776 logo design task data on Taskcn.com from the year 2015 to 2018, we analyzed the impact of task density on the solvers' participation and the regulating effect of the two important factors of task setting, namely task rewards and task duration, on the task density. The results showed that the task density was negatively correlated with the quantity of the task solutions submitted; the task duration was positively adjusting the impact of task density on the quantity of solution submitted, that is, increasing the task duration could reduce the negative impact of the competitive environment on the quantity of solutions submitted. The regulating effect of the task rewards on the relationship between the task density and the amount of solutions submitted was not significant. The possible reason is that increasing the rewards does not enable the solver to have more time to participate in other tasks. The task rewards have no regulating effect on the task density.