Crowdsourcing with All-Pay Auctions: A Field Experiment on Taskcn

To explore the effects of different incentives on crowdsourcing participation and submission quality, we conduct a randomized field experiment on Taskcn, a large Chinese crowdsourcing site using mechanisms with features of an all-pay auction. In our study, we systematically vary the size of the reward as well as the presence of a soft reserve, or early high-quality submission. We find that a higher reward induces significantly more submissions and submissions of higher quality. In comparison, we find that high-quality users are significantly less likely to enter tasks where a high-quality solution has already been submitted, resulting in lower overall quality in subsequent submissions in such soft reserve treatments.

Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1845.

This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.