Let me choose what I want: The influence of incentive choice flexibility on the quality of crowdsourcing solutions to innovation problems

Ehsan Noorzad Moghaddam, Alireza Aliahmadi, Mehdi Bagherzadeh, Stefan Markovic, Milena Micevski and Fatemeh Saghafi

Technovation, 2023, vol. 120, issue C

Abstract: Organizations increasingly engage in crowdsourcing to find solutions to their innovation problems, but many of these solutions are of low quality. This could be because organizations do not really know what motivates each individual participant to engage in crowdsourcing, and thus offer the same incentives to all. As a ‘one-size-fits-all’ incentive structure is not optimal due to divergent participant motives, in this paper, we aim to empirically investigate how providing participants with incentive choice flexibility impacts solution quality. Based on a between-subject field experiment, we find that participants who have an opportunity to choose their preferred incentive spend much more time developing their solutions and come up with higher quality solutions than those who are offered a single incentive option. Our study contributes to the literature by highlighting the importance of adopting a flexible incentive structure to improve the quality of the crowdsourced solutions, and by suggesting that an exclusive focus on how a single incentive type (either non-monetary or monetary) impacts solution quality is unsuitable for estimating such impact correctly.

Keywords: Crowdsourcing; Field experiment; Innovation problems; Motivation; Incentives; Solution quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166497222002309
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:techno:v:120:y:2023:i:c:s0166497222002309

DOI: 10.1016/j.technovation.2022.102679

Access Statistics for this article

Technovation is currently edited by Jonathan Linton

More articles in Technovation from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().