Curse of Experience in Creative Crowdsourcing Contests and Contest Searches as Remedies

In creative crowdsourcing contests that seek novel ideas and solutions, experience lays the foundation for solvers to use relevant knowledge to generate solutions but may also fixate solvers’ creativity, which we call the curse of experience. This study examines how experience affects solvers’ performance in such contests and how contest searches (searching descriptive information about other contests), as a type of external information-seeking activity, moderate the effects of experience. Our analyses show that both the benefit and curse of experience coexist. Solvers’ experience contributes to a higher ability of generating acceptable submissions (solutions meeting basic quality standards) but reduces the chance of creating winning solutions (extreme value solutions selected as contest winners). Contest searches prior to participation in a contest provide solvers with choices of contests, strengthening the beneficial effects of experience on creating both acceptable and winning solutions. Contest searches that happen during participation in a contest, although potentially triggering an overload effect that decreases the beneficial effect of experience on solution acceptance, also bring new ideas and inspirations to solvers’ solution search processes, reducing the impedimental effect of experience on creating winning solutions. Searches of contests that differ in skill or context from the focal contest are beneficial in both prior and parallel contest search processes but are not fully utilized by solvers. These findings delineate a comprehensive picture of how contest search activities can remedy the curse of experience and suggest effective design and use of search features by crowdsourcing platforms and solution seekers to help improve solvers’ performance.