报告题目：Cryptocurrency Rewards and Crowdsourcing Task Outcomes

时间：2024年7月4日 9:30-11:00

地点：中关村校区主楼317

报告人：赵霞副教授

报告人简介：

Dr. Xia Zhao is an Associate Professor of Management Information Systems at The University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. degree in Management Science and Information Systems from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include risk management, platform economy, IT governance, mobile computing, artificial intelligence, fintech, and knowledge analytics. She has published papers in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Management Information Systems, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Information Systems Frontier, IEEE Computer, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, etc. She is a senior editor of Decision Support Systems and an associate editor of the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce.

报告内容简介：

The success of crowdsourcing tasks is critically dependent on the capability and skills of developers. A challenge faced by task funders is identifying and attracting capable developers to contribute to their tasks. Emergent crowdsourcing platforms allow task funders to reward developers using cryptocurrencies, which impose significant uncertainty on developers. This study investigates how reward uncertainty impacts developers’ participation in crowdsourcing tasks and the success of tasks and explores the underlying mechanisms. We leverage the inherent difference in uncertainty among cryptocurrencies and a policy change of reward options on a crowdsourcing platform to examine the effect of reward uncertainty on developers’ behavior and task outcomes. Our results show that using uncertain cryptocurrency rewards leads to fewer developers participating in the tasks, but interestingly, it does not impact task success. We further examine the moderating role of task difficulty in the relationship of rewarding uncertainty and task outcomes and the profiles of developers participating in crowdsourcing tasks to explore the underlying mechanisms. We identify a screening effect—uncertainty rewards can help crowdfunding tasks skim incapable developers but keep capable ones without jeopardizing task success. Our study provides important implications on the use of uncertain rewards in crowdsourcing tasks and the role of uncertainty in cryptocurrency incentives.