Research on Factors Affecting Solvers’ Participation Time in Online Crowdsourcing Contests

A crowdsourcing contest is one of the most popular modes of crowdsourcing and is also an important tool for an enterprise to implement open innovation. The solvers’ active participation is one of the major reasons for the success of crowdsourcing contests. Research on solvers’ participation behavior is helpful in understanding the sustainability and incentives of solvers’ participation in the online crowdsourcing platform. So, how to attract more solvers to participate and put in more effort is the focus of researchers. In this regard, previous studies mainly used the submission quantity to measure solvers’ participation behavior and lacked an effective measure on the degree of participation effort expended by a solver. For the first time, we use solvers’ participation time as a dependent variable to measure their effort in a crowdsourcing contest. Thus, we incorporate participation time into the solver’s participation research. With the data from Taskcn.com, we analyze how participation time is affected four key factors including task design, task description, task process, and environment, respectively. We found that, first, for task design, higher task rewards will attract solvers to invest more time in the participation process and the relationship between participation time and task duration is inverted U-shaped. Second, for task description, the length of the task description has a negative impact on participation time and the task description attachment will positively influence the participation time. Third, for the task process, communication and supplementary explanations in a crowdsourcing process positively affect participation time. Fourth, for environmental factors, the task density of the crowdsourcing platform and the market price of all crowdsourcing contests have respectively negative and positive effects on participation time.