A data-driven game theoretic strategy for developers in software crowdsourcing: a case study

Crowdsourcing has the advantages of being cost-effective and saving time, which is a typical embodiment of collective wisdom and community workers’ collaborative development. However, this development paradigm of software crowdsourcing has not been used widely. A very important reason is that requesters have limited knowledge about crowd workers’ professional skills and qualities. Another reason is that the crowd workers in the competition cannot get the appropriate reward, which affects their motivation. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a method of maximizing reward based on the crowdsourcing ability of workers, they can choose tasks according to their own abilities to obtain appropriate bonuses. Our method includes two steps: Firstly, it puts forward a method to evaluate the crowd workers’ ability, then it analyzes the intensity of competition for tasks at Topcoder.com—an open community crowdsourcing platform—on the basis of the workers’ crowdsourcing ability; secondly, it follows dynamic programming ideas and builds game models under complete information in different cases, offering a strategy of reward maximization for workers by solving a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. This paper employs crowdsourcing data from Topcoder.com to carry out experiments. The experimental results show that the distribution of workers’ crowdsourcing ability is uneven, and to some extent it can show the activity degree of crowdsourcing tasks. Meanwhile, according to the strategy of reward maximization, a crowd worker can get the theoretically maximum reward

Understanding and Leveraging Crowd Development in Crowdsourcing

abstract: Although many examples have demonstrated the great potential of a human crowd as an alternative supplier in creative problem-solving, empirical evidence shows that the performance of a crowd varies greatly even under similar situations. This phenomenon is defined as the performance variation puzzle in crowdsourcing. Cases suggest that crowd development influences crowd performance, but little research in crowdsourcing literature has examined the issue of crowd development. This dissertation studies how crowd development impacts crowd performance in crowdsourcing. It first develops a double-funnel framework on crowd development. Based on structural thinking and four crowd development examples, this conceptual framework elaborates different steps of crowd development in crowdsourcing. By doing so, this dissertation partitions a crowd development process into two sub-processes that map out two empirical studies. The first study examines the relationships between elements of event design and crowd emergence and the mechanisms underlying these relationships. This study takes a strong inference approach and tests whether tournament theory is more applicable than diffusion theory in explaining the relationships between elements of event design and crowd emergence in crowdsourcing. Results show that that neither diffusion theory nor tournament theory fully explains these relationships. This dissertation proposes a contatition (i.e., contagious competition) perspective that incorporates both elements of these two theories to get a full understanding of crowd emergence in crowdsourcing. The second empirical study draws from innovation search literature and tournament theory to address the performance variation puzzle through analyzing crowd attributes. Results show that neither innovation search perspective nor tournament theory fully explains the relationships between crowd attributes and crowd performance. Based on the research findings, this dissertation discovers a competition-search mechanism beneath the variation of crowd performance in crowdsourcing. This dissertation makes a few significant contributions. It maps out an emergent process for the first time in supply chain literature, discovers the mechanisms underlying the performance implication of a crowd-development process, and answers a research call on crowd engagement and utilization. Managerial implications for crowd management are also discussed.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Business Administration 201

Does foreign direct investment crowd our domestic entrepreneurship?.

In analyzing firm entry and exit in the small open economy of Belgium, this paper empirically shows that import competition and foreign direct investment crowd out domestic entrepreneurs on product and labor markets. These results are in line with theoretical models of entrepreneurial choice in open economies that have explicitly included the effects of international competition on the formation of domestic entrepreneurs. The empirical analysis demonstrates that the inflow of foreign direct investment in Belgium reduces entrepreneurship measured through the entry of new domestic firms, while increasing domestic exit in the short term. Moreover, the results suggest that the decision of foreign firms to enter and/or exit a small economy is mainly determined by international conditions and less by domestic market conditions.Domestic; Foreign investment; Investment; Open; Economy; Competition; Entrepreneurs; Product; Labor market; Markets; Models; Model; Effects; International;

Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity

This paper shows that reciprocity has powerful implications for many economic domains. It is an important determinant in the enforcement of contracts and social norms and enhances the possibilities of collective action greatly. Reciprocity may render the provision of explicit incentive inefficient because the incentives may crowd out voluntary co-operation. It strongly limits the effects to competition in markets with incomplete contracts and gives rise to noncompetitive wage differences. Finally, reciprocity it is also a strong force contributing to the existence of incomplete contracts.

Does foreign direct investment crowd out domestic entrepreneurship?

In analyzing firm entry and exit across Belgian manufacturing industries, this paper presents evidence that import competition and foreign direct investment discourage entry and stimulate exit of domestic entrepreneurs. These results are in line with theoretical occupational choice models that predict foreign direct investment would crowd out domestic entrepreneurs through their selections in product and labor markets. However, the empirical results also suggest that this crowding out effect may be moderated or even reversed in the long-run due to the long term positive effects of FDI on domestic entrpreneurship as a result of learning, demonstration, networking and linkage effects between foreign and domestic firms.FDI, entrepreneurship, entry/exit

Public Radio in the United States: Does It Correct Market Failure or Cannibalize Commercial Stations?

Radio signals are pure public goods whose total value to society is the sum of their value to advertisers and listeners. Because broadcasters can capture only part of the value of their product as revenue, there is the potential for a classic problem of underprovision. Small markets have much less commercial program variety than larger markets, suggesting a possible underprovision problem. Public funding of radio broadcasting targets programming in three formats - news, classical music, and jazz - with at least some commercial competition. Whether public support corrects a market failure depends on whether the market would have provided similar services in the absence of public broadcasting. To examine this we ask whether public and commercial classical stations compete for listening share and revenue. We then directly examine whether public stations crowd out commercial stations. We find evidence consistent with the view that public broadcasting crowds out commercial programming in large markets, particularly in classical music and to a lesser extent in jazz. Although the majority of government subsidies to radio broadcasting are allocated to stations without commercial competition in their format (thereby possibly correcting inefficient market underprovision), roughly a quarter of subsidies support direct competition with existing commercial stations.

Valuing New Goods in a Model with Complementarities: Online Newspapers

Many important economic questions hinge on the extent to which new goods either crowd out or complement consumption of existing products. Recent methods for studying new goods are based on demand models that rule out complementarity by assumption, so their applicability to these questions has been limited. I develop a new model that relaxes this restriction, and use it to study the specific case of competition between print and online newspapers. Using new micro data from the Washington DC market, I show that the major print and online papers appear to be strong complements in the raw data, but that this is an artifact of unobserved consumer heterogeneity. I estimate that the online paper reduced print readership by 27,000 per day, at a cost of $5.5 million per year in lost print profits. I find that online news has provided substantial welfare benefits to consumers and that charging positive online prices is unlikely to substantially increase firm profits.

Firm Ownership, FOEs, and POEs

Where the theory of free competition reigns, developing countries should open their arms to investments from all types of enterprises in order to maximize jobs. Ownership, measured by votes of shareholders or boards of directors, is immaterial to performance. Matters change drastically, though, when competition depends on monopolistic assets and market theory no longer rigorously holds. Then, ownership matters. Foreign owned enterprises from developed countries can 'crowd out' privately owned enterprises from developing countries. They can break their back before they have a chance to acquire their own assets. FOEs in direct competition with POEs are not necessary for economic development to flourish, and it is dangerous for a promising POE to confront a privileged FOE in its own back yard, often with the backing of the FOE's powerful government. In this paper it is argued that because assets differ systematically between FOEs and POEs in their respective stages of evolution, FOEs may not contribute more to economic development in monopolistic industries than POEs. Indeed, the best POEs in the fastest growing emerging economies (e.g. Korea's Samsung, India's Tata, and Brazil's Embraer) tend to be more entrepreneurial than FOEs. The paper discusses the contribution of POEs vis-a-vis FOEs to economic development in emerging economies.entrepreneurship, foreign investment, firm ownership, industrialization

Changing preferences: an experiment and estimation of market-incentive effects on altruism

This paper studies how altruistic preferences are changed by markets and incentives. We conduct a laboratory experiment in a within-subject design. Subjects are asked to choose health care qualities for hypothetical patients in monopoly, duopoly, and quadropoly. Prices, costs, and patient benefits are experimental incentive parameters. In monopoly, subjects choose quality to tradeoff between profits and altruistic patient benefits. In duopoly and quadropoly, we model subjects playing a simultaneous-move game. Each subject is uncertain about an opponent's altruism, and competes for patients by choosing qualities. Bayes-Nash equilibria describe subjects' quality decisions as functions of altruism. Using a nonparametric method, we estimate the population altruism distributions from Bayes-Nash equilibrium qualities in different markets and incentive configurations. Markets tend to reduce altruism, although duopoly and quadropoly equilibrium qualities are much higher than those in monopoly. Although markets crowd out altruism, the disciplinary powers of market competition are stronger. Counterfactuals confirm markets change preferences.Accepted manuscrip

Do the Higher Educated Unemployed Crowd out the Lower Educated Ones in a Competition for Jobs ?

This paper proposes a new method to estimate the extent of job competition between workers with different schooling levels. We estimate the structural parameters of a matching function generalised to incorporate crowding out effects. We use flow data out of unemployment containing information on the level of educational attainment of the worker, but not on the level of schooling required by the employer for the job. The method therefore avoids the bias induced by mismeasurement in the educational requirements. Applied to Belgian data, we find evidence of significant crowding out among dismissed workers, particularly at the highest schooling levels.Job competition;crowding out;overeducation;matching function;duration analysis