Challenge Accepted: The Effects of Contest Participation on a User-Generated Content Community

Problem definition: Integrating contests into established firm-driven User Generated Content (UGC) communities presents a complex interplay between innovation and communal engagement. The impact of such contests on both the creative outcomes and the community’s dynamics remains largely unexplored. Methodology/results: We combine two different data sources stemming from the 3D printing platform Thingiverse, allowing us to compare (a) regular content creation activities shared with the existing platform community with (b) content creation activities explicitly pertaining to the contests launched in the existing platform community. Our empirical analyses show that contests increase community reaction given a “spotlight effect” and contestants’ increasing efforts. Second, we find that post-contest participation, submissions to future contests are increased, and submissions to the general community are decreased. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the net effect of contest participation on future content creation overall is negative. Third, our results show that contestants develop more exploratory outcomes, suggesting that contests redirect participants’ attention to venture into new, unfamiliar domains when problem-solving. Managerial implications: Our study provides important insights pertaining to the operations management of digital platforms by comparing the amount and diversity of user-generated content stemming from two platform initiatives: contests versus community. If managers aim to increase overall content quantity, introducing contests to an existing community may be detrimental as they seem to primarily trigger contest related UGC and not “regular community” content. If they aim for content diversity instead, contests are a vehicle to promote contestants’ exploratory behavior. These results provide detailed guidance for managers interested in applying communal and competitive initiatives on user-generated content platforms and highlight the importance of technologies in facilitating social interactions between and among users and firms more broadly.

Funding: This work was supported by the Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel, the Jeremy Coller Foundation, and the Field Family Foundation.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.0375.