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

Harnessing the Creative Potential of Consumers: Money, Participation and Creativity in Idea Crowdsourcing

Given the growing importance of innovation and consumer engagement, many firms are strongly interested in finding ways to encourage their consumers to generate creative new product ideas for them in their crowdsourcing initiatives. To that end, managers often use monetary rewards – one of the most commonly used managerial tools to stimulate desired behaviors. A critical question in this respect is whether the use of monetary rewards is effective in stimulating creativity and, if so, how large those rewards should be. This study aims to answer these questions. The results of an experiment suggest that introducing monetary rewards does not contribute to the number of new product ideas generated by a single consumer or the novelty of his/her ideas, and when the reward is relatively small it can even be harmful. Monetary rewards, however, are effective in encouraging widespread participation in crowdsourcing initiatives and improving the appropriateness of the new product ideas. As a whole, these findings take us a step further toward better understanding the motivational mechanisms of consumer creativity in new product ideation

Sustaining Participant Involvement in Crowdsourcing Contests through Collaboration

With the advances in internet technologies and the emergence of crowdsourcing, organizations are now increasingly looking outside their boundaries for solving problems. Yet, the success of crowdsourcing processes depends on the sustained participation of crowdsourcing individuals. Previous studies have mainly focused on understanding individuals’ initial motivation for participation with few focusing on the factors that affect individuals’ sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests. None of these studies examined how collaboration affects individuals’ participation behavior in crowdsourcing contests. This study attempts to understand how individuals’ collaboration (in the form of comments and votes) affects their sustained participation in online problem solving contests. This study uses data from the Kaggle website that holds online data science competitions in which individuals submit their proposed solutions with the best solutions being rewarded. Our results show that individuals who receive more attention from other members tend to come back and maintain their participation in the platform

10 simple rules to create a serious game, illustrated with examples from structural biology

Serious scientific games are games whose purpose is not only fun. In the field of science, the serious goals include crucial activities for scientists: outreach, teaching and research. The number of serious games is increasing rapidly, in particular citizen science games, games that allow people to produce and/or analyze scientific data. Interestingly, it is possible to build a set of rules providing a guideline to create or improve serious games. We present arguments gathered from our own experience ( Phylo , DocMolecules , HiRE-RNA contest and Pangu) as well as examples from the growing literature on scientific serious games

Promoting information literacy through a student video contest

This presentation discusses the concept of user-generated content and fansourcing/crowdsourcing, using a video contest, to encourage student participation in the area of information literacy and library instruction. The activity can be a strategy to position the library within campus life and offers an opportunity for constructivist learning

What Sustains Individuals’ Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests?

Crowdsourcing contests have become widely adopted for idea generation and problem-solving in various companies in different industries. The success of crowdsourcing depends on the sustained participation and quality-submissions of the individuals. Yet, little is known about the factors that influence individuals’ continued participation in these contests. We address this issue, by conducting an empirical study using data from an online crowdsourcing contest platform, Kaggle, which delivers data science and machine learning solutions and models to its clients. The findings show that the community activities and team activities do not contribute to motivating the continued participation, but tenure does significantly affect the continued participation. We also found statistically significant effects of amount of prize, number of competitions, previous team performance, and competition duration on individuals sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests. This research contributes to the literature by identifying the factors influencing individuals’ sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests

Heterogeneity Based Solvers’ Segmentation In Crowdsourcing

Multiple facets of factors were examined to be drivers for crowdsourcing intention. However, there is limited research that has studied whether this factors-intention link is uniform for all solvers or not in detail. In fact, the present studies have identified three different segments that are internally consistent and stable. The comparison between the results of two different solutions, single-class and prediction-oriented-segmentation, confirms the existence of unobserved solver segments. The three established segments are “Self-leading solvers”, “External-driving solvers” and “Dual-driving solvers”. These results point the way for factors-based segmentation in intention initiatives and reflect the importance of a multidimensional conceptualization of factors, comprising motivation, perceived sponsor’s and platform’s support components. The paper expands and deepens the application of the heterogeneity theory in the study of crowdsourcing usage behavior and offers implications for organizers to recognize the solvers more clearly and get directions for more valid strategies