Exploring the Motivation of Participants in Crowdsourcing Contest

Crowdsourcing is known as a problem-solving strategy enabled by Web 2.0 evolution and sociotechnical systems. Crowdsourcing contest is a typical case of crowdsourcing and has been adopted by many organizations for business solution and decision-making. From a participant’s perspective, it is interesting to explore what motivates people to participate in crowdsourcing contest. The focus of this study is to investigate the category of motivation based on self-determination theory and synthesizes various motivation factors in crowdsourcing contest. Meanwhile, motivational affordances and task granularity are also examined as the moderate constructs. The research-in-progress paper builds a conceptual model to illustrate the relationships between various motivations and participation effort under the moderating of motivational affordances and task granularity. Overall, our study may theoretically contribute to the literatures and provide directions for further empirical studies, which may yield some practical implications for designers, policy-makers, and managers in crowdsourcing contest.

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