The Effects of Prize and Scheduling Strategies in Crowdsourcing activities

Crowdsourcing provides an efficiency mode to explore crowd knowledge resource. It can provide diverse solutions for problem solving. However, how to design crowdsourcing strategies to drive crowd to participate in crowdsourcing activities is the focus of crowdsourcing platform management. Extant research mainly concentrated on prize strategy whereas little attention has been paid to scheduling strategy. Yet holistic crowdsourcing strategy should incorporate both scheduling strategy and prize strategy. Based on motivation incentive theory, this research applied over 154 thousand crowdsourcing projects’ secondary data to examine the impact of crowdsourcing strategy. Both prize strategy and scheduling strategy have a positive effect on the number of participants. Furthermore, there is a positive interaction effect between prize and scheduling. These findings can enrich crowdsourcing theory and provide implications in crowdsourcing strategy design.