Winning by Learning? Effect of Knowledge Sharing in Crowdsourcing Contests

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a new way for online crowds to get involved in a company’s research and development process. Businesses can host public contests on online platforms (such as Kaggle, Topcoder, and Tongal) to seek new product ideas and technological solutions. In the contest communities, members usually have a “coopetitive” relationship: they compete against each other for the contest prize, while at the same time also cooperate with each other by sharing information and knowledge. This work investigates the effect of knowledge sharing in such crowdsourcing contests. Surprisingly, we find that the knowledge sharing process may not always help improve crowdsourcing contestants’ performance. The effectiveness of knowledge sharing is influenced by the volume, quality, and generativity of shared knowledge. Shared knowledge is only beneficial when it is of high quality or when it has high potential of being further developed collectively by the community. Meanwhile, the development process has to be diverging; narrowing the development process in one direction can restrict the community creativity and negatively influence crowdsourcing performance. Our work informs the crowdsourcing practitioners to be more cautious when they enable collaboration such as knowledge sharing for the contest community.

Effects of introducing an online community in a crowdsourcing contest platform

“…We hypothesised this boundary condition would emerge based on cognitive diversity and this finding challenges the implicit assumption that participants in online communities benefit equally (Faraj et al, 2011; Faraj et al, 2016). This finding joins with the work of others (e.g., Jin et al, 2021) who demonstrate important contingencies on the benefits of communtition platforms. Our work clearly shows that not everyone benefits equally from the introduction of an online community.…”

“…One of the key benefits of online communities is the learning and experience new participants develop as they engage with the community (Archak & Ghose, 2010; Chen et al, 2018; Jin et al, 2021; Mamykina et al, 2016). So, the introduction of an online community to a crowdsourcing contest platform may disproportionally benefit less experienced contestants.…”

“…Recent research has demonstrated that contestants help each other, even in highly competitive contests, and this help is often reciprocated (Dissanayake et al, 2021). This exchange of help improves contestant performance (Dissanayake et al, 2021), especially as contestants share high-quality and generative knowledge (Jin et al, 2021), and interaction between contestants also increases the remixing of ideas to form new innovations (Stanko, 2016). But past research has yet to examine the effects of introducing an online community to a crowdsourcing contest platform (see Appendix A for a review).…”

“…For example, knowledge sharing, by itself, does not necessarily improve crowdsourcing contestant performance (Yang et al, 2008). Instead, performance improvement is contingent on volume, quality, and generativity of shared knowledge (Jin et al, 2021). Early research on crowdsourcing performance identified prior experience among the most significant predictors of success (Bayus, 2013; Huang et al, 2014).…”

Conflict or Collaboration—The Impact of Knowledge Endowment Heterogeneity on Remix in Open Collaborative Communities

“…This helps create an atmosphere for innovation within the community, promote the knowledge exchange and sharing among users, consolidate the collaborative psychology in remix, and offer more possibilities for remix. Finally, there will be more remixes within the community, thus improving the community performance in remix ( Rodan and Galunic, 2004 ; Cao and Yang, 2015 ; Jin et al, 2021 ). However, too high knowledge endowment heterogeneity will result in an excessively heterogenous cognition and value judgment among users, a too strong conflicting psychology, and ultimately a reduction in the remix performance within the community.…”