Parallel and Sequential Testing of Design Alternatives
Management Science
An Extreme-Value Model of Concept Testing
Management Science
Recombinant Uncertainty in Technological Search
Management Science
Collaborative Prototyping and the Pricing of Custom-Designed Products
Management Science
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Innovation Contests, Open Innovation, and Multiagent Problem Solving
Management Science
Relative Performance Compensation, Contests, and Dynamic Incentives
Management Science
Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea
Management Science
Marginality and Problem-Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search
Organization Science
Organizing for Innovation in the Digitized World
Organization Science
Crowd vs. crowd: large-scale cooperative design through open team competition
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work companion
The Effects of Rewarding User Engagement: The Case of Facebook Apps
Information Systems Research
Information and Organization
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
Challenges of implementing innovation contests to facilitate radical innovation
International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations
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Contests are a historically important and increasingly popular mechanism for encouraging innovation. A central concern in designing innovation contests is how many competitors to admit. Using a unique data set of 9,661 software contests, we provide evidence of two coexisting and opposing forces that operate when the number of competitors increases. Greater rivalry reduces the incentives of all competitors in a contest to exert effort and make investments. At the same time, adding competitors increases the likelihood that at least one competitor will find an extreme-value solution. We show that the effort-reducing effect of greater rivalry dominates for less uncertain problems, whereas the effect on the extreme value prevails for more uncertain problems. Adding competitors thus systematically increases overall contest performance for high-uncertainty problems. We also find that higher uncertainty reduces the negative effect of added competitors on incentives. Thus, uncertainty and the nature of the problem should be explicitly considered in the design of innovation tournaments. We explore the implications of our findings for the theory and practice of innovation contests. This paper was accepted by Christian Terwiesch, operations management.