Speaker: Chen Jianqing (The University of Texas at Dallas, Naveen Jindal School of Management, Professor)
Host: Zhang Yulin (Southeast University, Professor)
Time: 10:30a.m. (Beijing time)
Date: September 25th, 2022
Tencent Meeting ID: 531 409 730, Password: 2022
Meeting Link: https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/gcLqC04B13cW
Special reminder: Attendances shall use their true name when entering the meeting or will be therefore removed from the meeting!
Abstract:
Crowdsourcing platforms provide venues for firms looking for solutions (seekers) to interact with individuals who can provide solutions (solvers). As crowdsourcing contest platforms have grown in popularity with numerous tasks being posted on a daily basis, a concern that has emerged is that many similar tasks compete for solver attention, with some tasks failing to attract sufficient solver participation. To alleviate such a concern, in addition to regular task listings, many crowdsourcing platforms offer sponsorship programs under which seekers pay an extra fee for highlighting their tasks to draw solvers’ attention. We examine the effect of sponsorship on solver participation using a unique data set collected from a leading crowdsourcing platform. In contrast to platforms’ claims about the effect of sponsorship on participation, we find that sponsorship does not always boost participation in crowdsourcing contests; sponsorship increases the number of participants only when the prize amount for a task is already high. Furthermore, even when the number of participants increases, the increase primarily comes from low-ability solvers. We also find that when sponsorship increases the total number of submissions, it does so only through increasing the number of participants; sponsorship does not increase the number of submissions individual solvers submit after joining a task. A more granular analysis reveals an effect of anticipated increased competition caused by sponsorship on high-ability solvers but not on those of low ability, explaining the difference in their participation decisions when facing sponsored tasks. We also find the effect of sponsorship weakens over the duration of a task for high-ability solvers and is also weaker for solvers with more experience on the platform.
About Speaker:
Chen Jianqing is a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, Naveen Jindal School of Management, who mainly does research in fields such as platform business models, social media and user-generated content, advertisement searching, and economy in information systems. He has published several academic articles in Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Production and Operations Management, and Journal of Management Information Systems, and many other international top-class journals, and is recently the associate editor of Information Systems Research, Production and Operations Management, and other international journals.
He won Dean’s Award for Outstanding New Scholar in 2019, ISS Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award of INFORMs in 2016, Best Paper Award of China Summer Workshop on Information Management in 2007, 2012, and 2015, and Best Paper Award at the 15th Conference on Information Systems and Technology in 2010.
Hosted by: the School of Economics and Management, Southeast University
Co-organized by: Union of Management Science and Engineering of Colleges in Jiangsu
Translated by: Li Zhaoting
