Lost Time in Crowdsourcing Contests

Crowdsourcing contests have become increasingly popular as a means of seeking innovative solutions to business problems. However, the abundance of concurrent contests on platforms can lead to disparities in solvers’ contest awareness, resulting in “lost time”—the time elapsed between the start of a contest and a solver’s first visit. This study investigates how lost time influences solvers’ submission behavior and its subsequent impact on matching inefficacy as measured by solver disqualification, which occurs when a solver fails to produce a submission meeting the seeker’s baseline criteria. Utilizing a proprietary data set from a European crowdsourcing platform, we employ a mediation analysis framework to examine the relationship between lost time and two key dimensions of submission behavior: time to first submission and number of submissions. Our findings reveal that higher levels of lost time are associated with fewer submissions, indicating reduced solver persistence. However, this negative effect is partially mitigated by solvers’ faster initial submissions when facing lost time. Importantly, we demonstrate that changes in submission behavior fully mediate the negative impact of lost time on solver disqualification, highlighting the crucial role of submission behavior in influencing solver disqualification. Furthermore, we provide evidence supporting latecomer disadvantage as an important mechanism driving solvers’ behavioral responses to lost time. Our study contributes to the crowdsourcing literature by uncovering the impact of lost time on solvers’ behavior and performance, offering valuable insights for contest design. By understanding and mitigating the effects of latecomer disadvantage, platforms can enhance the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in solving problems.

History: Pei-yu Chen, Senior Editor; Chad Ho, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.0502.