Research On Seeker Affecting Solvers’ Behavior In Crowdsourcing Contest

The widely use of internet creates the new opportunities for enterprises. By means of internet, enterprises make efforts to seek the ways to use the external source, and the Crowdsourcing Contest, which can aid the enterprises to find and use the intelligent source that are from all over the world, comes into being. The crowdsourcing contest not only explores the power of net citizens and meets their goal to show their talents, but also helps the enterprises to innovate rapidly. The enterprises can build their own crowdsourcing websites, or can take use of professional crowdsourcing websites to collect the various ideas from people outside firms, which can greatly enrich the innovative source. The era of internet crowdsourcing is coming to us, for crowdsourcing builds the platform which can fit the creativity of net citizens with the innovative request of the enterprises together, so the strong base has been offered for firms to implement crowdsourcing contest model.As a new model, the crowdsourcing contest has been widely used in the enterprising field, which also attracts numerous scholars to study it. Since crowdsourcing came into being, the research on crowdsourcing domestic and overseas increased rapidly. However, most studies in this field mainly fall in limited several aspects, such as the concepts of crowdsourcing, the elements of crowdsourcing, the motives of solvers’participation, the characters of management model, and so on. It is hard to find empirical research among the studies, and it’s exceedingly rare to study the impact of seeker’s behaviors on solvers from the perspective of seeker, which tells that it is necessary to do the systematic study on the interacts between participants in crowdsourcing contest.Based on the classic theories, including Theory of Reasoned Action, Theory of Job Design and Theory of Credit, this thesis focus on the impacts of task design, the seekers’ credit and choosing platforms on the behaviors of solvers, building the models to do the data analysis, which lays stress on the practice of crowdsourcing contest.First, three key factors, including task design, the credit of seekers, and choosing crowdsourcing websites, are found out by means of Ground Theory, analyzing the data of stories of solvers from zbj.com. The quality of task design plays a significant role on telling the intention of seeker sufficiently to the solvers. Task design composes of topic design, task content, task award, and so on, which can affect the solvers to make decisions on whether to participate to work on this task. The credit of seekers reflects their credibility and integrity, including the remarks of solvers on seekers, which obviously affects the solvers’ participation. Choosing crowdsourcing is also very important because each website has its own influencing power, and the famous website can carry the crowdsourcing contest more efficiently.On the second, the model of task design on solvers’ participation is built according Theory of Reasoned Action and Theory of Job Design, proposing several hypothesis, and through empirical study to work out the result which shows that task design impacts the solvers’ participation directly. The result can provide seekers some suggestions in task design period, which is useful to improve the efficiency of crowdsourcing.Thirdly, the impact of seeker’s credit on solvers’ participation is carried out by use of OLS. The result tells that the seeker’s identity, credit grade and well-timed payment are positively correlated with the number of participants and grade of winning solution provider. Besides, the number of participants increases on the condition that the seeker provides identity certification; the grade of winning solution provider would be higher if the seeker gets more good remarks. The conclusion provides the seekers with theory evidences to improve their credible prestige and to increase the efficiency of crowdsourcing contest.Last but not least, the research of impact of choosing websites on solvers’ participation is implemented by analyzing the data from zbj.com and another famous Chinese crowdsourcing website. The result tells that for the same task, the solvers’ participation is various from different websites, which signifies that the website has the power to monitor the quality of task solutions. Therefore, the seekers should choose the appropriate website to make the contest task known to the public in order to achieve the goal as soon as possible.The results of this thesis can provide the seeker advice and suggestions for carrying out crowdsourcing contest model, and also provide crowdsourcing website guidance to improve the quality of service. Finally, some measures and suggestions are proposed for governments and public media to advance the development of crowdsourcing contest.