What Sustains Individuals’ Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests?

Abstract

Crowdsourcing contests have become widely adopted for idea generation and problem-solving in various companies in different industries. The success of crowdsourcing depends on the sustained participation and quality-submissions of the individuals. Yet, little is known about the factors that influence individuals' continued participation in these contests. We address this issue, by conducting an empirical study using data from an online crowdsourcing contest platform, Kaggle, which delivers data science and machine learning solutions and models to its clients. The findings show that the community activities and team activities do not contribute to motivating the continued participation, but tenure does significantly affect the continued participation. We also found statistically significant effects of amount of prize, number of competitions, previous team performance, and competition duration on individuals sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests. This research contributes to the literature by identifying the factors influencing individuals' sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests.

Who will Win the Data Science Competition? Insights from KDD Cup 2019 and Beyond

“…To name a few, Athanasopoulos et al [3] find real-time updated leaderboard is helpful for improving the accuracy of the final result, Hill et al [26] conclude that too few or too many collaborators negatively influence the quality of the final solution, Tausczik et al [53] investigate the influence of open sharing on the quality of the final solution. Moreover, Archak et al [2] find contestants are strategically choosing competitions to maximize their reward, Wang et al [57] study factors that influence contestant sustained participation, and Bullinger et al [8] find the positive effect of team cooperation, which also validates our observations in data science competitions. In this work, we focus on the data science competition and conduct a comprehensive quantitative and predictive analysis to understand the team's time-evolving performance in depth.…”

Crowdsourcing Contests: Understanding the Effect of Environment and Organization Specific Factors on Sustained Participation

“…Nguyen et al findings illustrate that the interaction among individuals and requesters results in individuals' higher engagement [42]. The current study on Kaggle platform shows statistically significant effects of amount of prize, tenure, number of competitions, previous team performance, and competition duration on individuals sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests [43]. None of the previous research studied how the team members' structural capital, or the familiarity and experience of an individual with the crowdsourcing organization affect their sustained participation.…”

“…Previous research indicates that self-efficacy moderates the relationship between motivation and sustained participation [19]. We controlled for "Tenure" which indicates the number of days that have passed from the individual's registration date in the platform until the current competition [43]. Previous research shows that individuals with longer tenure take longer time to come back to the platform and continue their participation in the other contests [43].…”

“…We controlled for "Tenure" which indicates the number of days that have passed from the individual's registration date in the platform until the current competition [43]. Previous research shows that individuals with longer tenure take longer time to come back to the platform and continue their participation in the other contests [43]. We controlled for the competition "duration" because duration is one of the factors that have received considerable attention in crowdsourcing research that affects individuals' participation in crowdsourcing contests [58].…”