Companies face the challenges of attracting solvers and motivating them to dedicate their time and effort to develop solutions in crowdsourcing contests. Previous research emphasizes the importance of crowdsourcing contest design for fostering solvers' engagement. However, even though contests are designed as a combination of various design elements, such as seeker's identity disclosure, seeker's status, contest duration and monetary prize, prior studies primarily focused on independent effects of these elements, ignoring their interdependency. Building our study on the social exchange theory, we adopt the neo-configurational perspective to explore effective designs of crowdsourcing contests and contribute to our understanding of how contest design elements interact to jointly stimulate solvers' engagement. By the means of the fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 277 contests, we show that the combination of long contest duration and high monetary prize plays a significant role in attracting solvers to join crowdsourcing contests, while these elements need to be additionally reinforced by the seeker's identity disclosure and its high status to motivate solvers to actually commit to problem solving. In this way, our study provides unique insights about the differences between contest designs that only initially attract solvers and designs that actually motivate them to create value for seeker companies. It fills the gap where previous research failed to embrace the configurational character of contest design, while offering unique guidance to managers who struggle to attract solvers to join and contribute to crowdsourcing initiatives.

中文翻译：

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众包中的竞赛设计和解决者的参与行为：新配置视角

公司面临着吸引解决者并激励他们投入时间和精力在众包竞赛中开发解决方案的挑战。先前的研究强调了众包竞赛设计对于培养解决者参与度的重要性。然而，尽管竞赛被设计为各种设计元素的组合，例如寻求者的身份披露、寻求者的状态、竞赛持续时间和金钱奖励，但先前的研究主要集中于这些元素的独立影响，而忽略了它们的相互依赖性。基于社会交换理论的研究，我们采用新配置视角来探索众包竞赛的有效设计，并有助于我们理解竞赛设计元素如何相互作用以共同刺激解决者的参与。通过对 277 场竞赛的模糊定性比较分析，我们发现，竞赛持续时间长和奖金高的结合对于吸引求解者参加众包竞赛具有重要作用，但这些因素还需要通过众包竞赛来进一步强化。寻求者的身份披露及其较高的地位可以激励解决者真正致力于解决问题。通过这种方式，我们的研究提供了关于最初吸引解决者的竞赛设计和真正激励他们为寻求者公司创造价值的设计之间差异的独特见解。它填补了之前的研究未能涵盖竞赛设计的配置特征的空白，同时为那些努力吸引解决者加入并为众包计划做出贡献的管理者提供了独特的指导。