Purpose

As the application of crowdsourcing contests grows, leveraging the participation of superstars (i.e. solvers who have outstanding performance records in a crowdsourcing platform) becomes an emergent approach for managers to solve crowdsourced problems. Although much is known about superstars’ performance implications, it remains unclear whether and how their participation affects the size of a contest crowd for a crowdsourcing contest. Based on social contagion theory, this paper aims to examine the impact of superstars’ participation on the crowd size and studies how this impact varies across solvers with different heterogeneity in terms of skills, exposure and cultural proximity with superstars in crowdsourcing contests.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper uses secondary data from one crowdsourcing platform that includes 6,587 innovation contests to examine superstars’ main and contextual effects on the crowd size of a contest.

Findings

Our results reveal that superstars’ participation positively affects the crowd size of a contest in general. This finding suggests that social contagion is a fundamental mechanism underlying crowd formation in crowdsourcing contests. Our results also indicate that in contests that involve multiple superstars, superstars’ effect on crowd size becomes negative when we simultaneously consider other solvers’ heterogeneity in terms of skills, exposure and cultural background, and this negative effect will be intensified by increases in the skill gap, extent of exposure and cultural proximity between superstars and other solvers in the same contest.

Originality/value

Our research enhances the understanding of the influence of superstars and the mechanism underlying the emergence of contest crowds in crowdsourcing contests and contributes knowledge to better understand social contagion in a competitive setting. The results are meaningful for sourcing managers and platform supervisors to design contests and supervise crowd size in crowdsourcing contests.

中文翻译：

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追随（或不追随）领导者：众包竞赛中超级明星对人群规模的影响

目的

随着众包竞赛应用的不断增长，利用超级明星（即在众包平台中具有出色表现记录的解决者）的参与成为管理者解决众包问题的一种新兴方法。尽管人们对超级明星的表现影响了解甚多，但仍不清楚他们的参与是否以及如何影响众包竞赛的参赛人群规模。基于社会传染理论，本文旨在检验超级明星的参与对人群规模的影响，并研究在众包竞赛中，在技能、曝光度和与超级明星的文化接近度方面具有不同异质性的解决者之间这种影响如何变化。

设计/方法论/途径

本文使用来自一个包含 6,587 场创新竞赛的众包平台的二手数据来研究超级明星对竞赛人群规模的主要影响和背景影响。

发现

我们的结果表明，超级明星的参与总体上对比赛的观众规模产生积极影响。这一发现表明，社会传染是众包竞赛中人群形成的基本机制。我们的结果还表明，在涉及多名超级明星的比赛中，当我们同时考虑其他解算者在技能、曝光度和文化背景方面的异质性时，超级明星对人群规模的影响会变得负面，并且这种负面影响会随着技能的增加而加剧同一场比赛中超级明星和其他解决者之间的差距、曝光程度和文化接近程度。

原创性/价值

我们的研究增强了对超级明星的影响力以及众包竞赛中竞赛人群出现的机制的理解，并为更好地理解竞争环境中的社会传染贡献了知识。研究结果对于采购经理和平台主管设计竞赛和监督众包竞赛的人群规模具有重要意义。