Abstract:

Crowdsourcing provides an efficiency mode to explore distributed crowd knowledge resource under open innovation environment. It can provide various and plenty of solutions for problem solving. However, driven crowd challenges crowdsourcer in business management. Outsource strategies play key role in attracting and inspiring solvers in crowdsourcing project, which influence the crowdsourcing performance. Prior research mainly focused on prize strategy and few shed light on scheduling strategy. However, holistic outsource strategy should include prize and scheduling simultaneously. Based on motivation incentive theory, this article applied 168 thousands real crowdsourcing projects’ secondary data to test the influence of outsource strategy. The positive effect of prize strategy is confirmed. The scheduling strategy has an inverted U shape effect on the numbers of submitted solutions. Furthermore, there is a negative interaction effect between prize and scheduling. High (low) prize configured with short (long) limitation can get an optimal influence on performance. The findings can enrich crowdsourcing theory and provide implication in outsource strategy design.

Key words: prize, scheduling, outsource strategy configuration, crowdsourcing performance