时间：2025年6月5日15:15

地点：经管楼1205室

主讲人：莫佳卉 助理教授，美国克莱姆森大学

题目：Contest or Contract: Assessing the Effectiveness of Contests in Online Labor Markets

摘要：Online labor markets have become increasingly popular for companies seeking global access to workers. Some of these online labor markets have adopted a contest-based scheme, allowing employers to review work outputs from multiple workers before selecting the best submission. This raises a crucial question for employers: given a predefined budget, should they choose a contest or contract scheme for tasks on an online platform. In this study, we examine the impact of contests relative to contracts on perceived work quality for design tasks which are characterized by high uncertainty. We utilized various empirical techniques to analyze data on these ideation jobs from a leading online labor market. The results suggest that jobs posted under contracts tend to produce higher perceived work quality than those posted under contests. Our findings further reveal that “copying” behaviors are among the main mechanisms that render contests an inferior scheme in online labor markets for design tasks. The competition inherent in contests did not produce the intended positive parallel path effect or positive incentive effect. Instead, the public nature of solutions in online contests makes it easy for workers to revise their solutions for a chance at winning the contest. Consequently, workers lose the motivation to put in strong efforts to enhance solution quality when competition and uncertainty increase. Even workers with good solutions lose the incentive to further improve their efforts. Copying behavior among workers was more rampant in contests with larger numbers of participants. These findings have important implications for both employers and online labor markets.

个人简介：Jiahui Mo is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Management at the Wilbur O. and Ann Powers College of Business, Clemson University. She received her Ph.D. from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her current research interests are in open innovation, crowdsourcing, online labor markets, digital platforms, and social media. Her contributions have appeared in MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research.