Quality (philosophy)

Incentive

Marketing

Common value auction

World Wide Web

Philosophy

Pure mathematics

Microeconomics

Field (mathematics)

Economics

Computer science

Business

Mathematics

Epistemology

Crowdsourcing

Management Science

To explore the effects of different incentives on crowdsourcing participation and submission quality, we conduct a randomized field experiment on Taskcn, a large Chinese crowdsourcing site using mechanisms with features of an all-pay auction. In our study, we systematically vary the size of the reward as well as the presence of a soft reserve, or early high-quality submission. We find that a higher reward induces significantly more submissions and submissions of higher quality. In comparison, we find that high-quality users are significantly less likely to enter tasks where a high-quality solution has already been submitted, resulting in lower overall quality in subsequent submissions in such soft reserve treatments. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1845 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Crowdsourcing with All-Pay Auctions: A Field Experiment on Taskcn