Winning by Learning? Effect of Knowledge Sharing in Crowdsourcing Contests

Crowdsourcing is a new way for online crowds to get involved in a company’s research and development process. Businesses can host public contests on online platforms (such as Kaggle, Topcoder, and Tongal) to seek new product ideas and technological solutions. In the contest communities, members usually have a “coopetitive” relationship: they compete against each other for the contest prize, while at the same time also cooperate with each other by sharing information and knowledge. This work investigates the effect of knowledge sharing in such crowdsourcing contests. Surprisingly, we find that the knowledge sharing process may not always help improve crowdsourcing contestants’ performance. The effectiveness of knowledge sharing is influenced by the volume, quality, and generativity of shared knowledge. Shared knowledge is only beneficial when it is of high quality or when it has high potential of being further developed collectively by the community. Meanwhile, the development process has to be diverging; narrowing the development process in one direction can restrict the community creativity and negatively influence crowdsourcing performance. Our work informs the crowdsourcing practitioners to be more cautious when they enable collaboration such as knowledge sharing for the contest community.