Adopting Seekers’ Solution Exemplars in Crowdsourcing Ideation Contests: Antecedents and Consequences

Abstract

To benefit from the wisdom of the crowd in ideation contests, seekers should understand how their involvement affects solvers’ ideation and the ensuing ideas. This present study addresses this need by examining the antecedents and consequences of solvers’ exemplar adoption (i.e., use of solution exemplars that the seekers provide) in such contests. We theorize how the characteristics of seekers’ exemplars (specifically, quantity and variability) and prizes jointly influence exemplar adoption. We also consider how exemplar adoption affects the effectiveness of the resulting ideas, conditional on solvers’ experience with the problem domain of the contests. The results from a company naming contest and an ad design contest show that exemplar quantity and exemplar variability both positively affect exemplar adoption, but the effects are strengthened and attenuated, respectively, by prize attractiveness. The outcomes of a campaign using the ads from the design contest further show that greater exemplar adoption improves ad effectiveness (in terms of click-through performance), although this is negatively moderated by solvers’ domain experience. We discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of this research to ideation contests.

Keywords: ideation contests, crowdsourcing, exemplars, prizes, contest winning, effort economization, payoff attractiveness, domain experience, banner ads, click-through