Towards a Game Theoretical Model for Software Crowdsourcing Processes

Recently software crowdsourcing has become an emerging development paradigm in software ecosystems. This paper first introduces a software crowdsourcing framework in the context of software ecosystems. The framework includes a game-theoretical model for peer software production to describe the competitive nature of software crowdsourcing. The analysis of this model indicates that if the only reward is the prize, only superior developers will participate in the software crowdsourcing. This explains the phenomenon that while software crowdsourcing is open for anyone to compete, but only few will engage in competition. This is validated by a large historical data collected from a popular software crowdsourcing website over a 10-years period. Further, we perform a case study on a NASA software crowdsourcing project to take a closer examination at how community developers participate in different types of tasks through the software crowdsourcing process.

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