Empirical Study On Influence Factors And Mechanisms Of Solvers' Task Effort And Continuance Intention In Crowdsourcing Contests

Advancement in information and communication technologies and enhancement in public participation have empowered crowdsourcing contest to be an increasingly popular choice for both incumbent and startup organizations for seeking innovations.Crowdsourcing contest provides a new way for organizations to solve problems by accessing and using crowd wisdom.A variety of crowdsourcing platforms have been accordingly established to provide crowdsourcing contest service.Serving as the intermediary,the survival and development of these crowdsourcing platforms depend heavily on solvers' participation.However,in recent years,many crowdsourcing platforms have failed to encourage solvers' task effort and continuance intention.A large number of solvers would not pay much effort during the task solving and gradually become inactive in crowdsourcing activities over time.In fact,the extent to which solvers pay effort for crowdsourcing tasks and participate in the crowdsourcing task persistently can essentially determine the sustainability and eventual success of crowdsourcing platforms.Thus,suffering from these challenges,how to encourage solvers' task effort and improve solvers' continuance intention have become pressing topics in order to promote the vitality and long-term success of crowdsourcing platforms.In line with crowdsourcing contest practice,extant crowdsourcing contest studies have investigated solvers' participation behavior from various perspectives.Through analyzing the existing crowdsourcing literature,we find that extant studies have mainly focused on solvers'initial participation.Related studies about solvers' task effort and continuance intention are relatively scare and limited and have some research gap.Thus,considering the practical challenges and theoretical research gap,this dissertation attempts to explore factors and influence mechanisms that can motivate solvers' task effort and continuance intention.With these attempts,this dissertation devotes to enrich extant studies and provides practical guidance to encourage solvers' task effort and continuance intention.The contents and the main contributions of this dissertation focus on the following aspects.Firstly,in order to explore how intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly affect solvers'task effort,this study develops a mediated moderation model drawing on cognitive evaluation theory and the engagement theory to explicitly explain the underlying mechanism and pathway.Our empirical results demonstrate that although both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives are positively related with task effort,their interaction negatively affect task effort.That is,the positive effect of intrinsic motivation on task effort becomes weakened when extrinsic incentives increase.Engagement is further found to play a mediating role in the relationship between the joint effect of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives and task effort,implying that the negative joint effect of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives on task effort could be buffered by engagement.The main contributions of this study lie in complementing the existing literature by employing cognitive evaluation theory and engagement theory to investigate solvers' task effort.This study also contributes to the understanding of the complex interrelationship between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives in crowdsourcing contest settings.These research findings help crowdsourcing contest practitioners better understand how solvers are motivated and provide theoretical and empirical evidence for leveraging intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives to jointly increase task effort.Secondly,drawing from expectation-confirmation model(ECM),this study explains solvers' confirmation process and its influence on continuance intention by considering the unique features of crowdsourcing contests and incorporating solvers' psychological-related factors toward the crowdsourcing platform.Our empirical results demonstrate that in the context of crowdsourcing contest,confirmation is not only positively related to perceived value and satisfaction,also positively related to platform trust,which in turn are all positively related to continuance intention.That is,confirmation can enhance solvers' continuance intention respectively through performance-related factor,i.e.,perceived value,and psychology-related factor,i.e.,platform trust.In addition,this study indicates that both interaction and perceived fairness are positively related to a high level of confirmation under the crowdsourcing contest settings.The main contributions of this study lie in not only proving ECM to be a viable theoretical foundation in crowdsourcing contests and suggesting ECM as an alternative theoretical framework for future studies,but also explaining the underlying mechanism and pathway for solvers' continuance intention by incorporating perceived value,interaction,and perceived fairness into the expectation-confirmation model.Our research findings can provide positive insights for crowdsourcing contest practitioners to improve solvers' continuance intention.Lastly,in terms of the underlying mechanism and pathway of behavioral control on solvers'continuance intention under the research context of crowdsourcing contests,this study builds a moderated mediation model along with sense of belonging and procedural fairness drawing insights from organizational control theory and perceived organizational support theory.Our empirical results show that sense of belonging has a mediating effect on the relationship between behavioral control and continuance intention.Procedural fairness is found to positively moderate the mediating effect of sense of belonging.That is,when procedural fairness is high,behavioral control can improve solvers' continuance intention indirectly through sense of belonging.While when procedural fairness is low,the mediating effect of sense of belonging becomes non-significant.These research findings highlight the importance of procedural fairness when leveraging the effect of behavioral control under the crowdsourcing contest settings.The important contributions of this study lie in enriching the extant crowdsourcing studies,discovering the key factors and conditions that influence the mechanism of behavioral control,and revealing how the influencing paths of behavioral control on solvers'continuance intention varies under different levels of procedural fairness.This study can provide some new knowledge and views for future studies.