报告主题: Sponsored Tasks and Solver Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests
报告人：陈建清
时间及地点：2018年7月11日（周三）上午10:00-11:30，管经新大楼B312
邀请人：李文立 教授
Abstract:
Crowdsourcing platforms provide a venue where firms looking for solutions (seekers) and individuals who can provide solutions (solvers) interact with each other. As crowdsourcing contest platforms have grown in popularity with numerous tasks being posted on a daily basis, a concern that has emerged is that many similar tasks compete for solver attention, with some tasks failing to attract sufficient solver participation. To alleviate such a concern, in addition to regular task listings, many crowdsourcing platforms offer sponsorship programs under which seekers pay an extra fee to highlight their tasks in order to draw the attention of solvers. We examine the effect of sponsorship on solver participation using a unique data set collected from a leading crowdsourcing platform. We find that, in sharp contrast to platforms’ claims on the effect of sponsorship on participation, sponsorship does not always boost participation in crowdsourcing contests; sponsorship increases the number of participants only when the prize amount for a task is already high. Furthermore, even when the number of participants increases, the increase primarily comes from low-ability solvers. We also find that when sponsorship increases the total number of submissions, it does so only through increasing the number of participants; in other words, sponsorship does not increase the number of submissions after solvers join the tasks.
Short Bio:
Jianqing Chen is an associate professor (tenured) in information systems at the Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. He received his Ph.D. from McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and his Bachelor and Master from Tsinghua University. His general research interests are in electronic commerce, economics of information systems, and supply chain management. His current research focuses are: (1) social media and user-generated content; (2) search engine advertising; (3) platform business models; and (4) supply chain risk management. His papers have been published in top academic journals across different fields, including Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Management Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Economics Letters, Decision Analysis, and Decision Support Systems. He received ISS Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award of INFORMs in 2016 and won Dean's Award for "Outstanding New Scholar" in 2009. In Tsinghua, he received the highest student honor---Tsinghua Top-Grade Scholarship. He received the Best Paper awards for the Fifteenth Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST) in 2010 and for the China Summer Workshop on Information Management (CSWIM) in 2007, 2012, and 2015. He is currently an Associate Editor of Information Systems Research and of Journal of Electronic Commerce Research. He co-chaired CSWIM 2016, and co-chair E-Business Cluster of INFORMs in 2013 and co-chaired Information Systems Cluster of INFORMs in 2014.
