Not Only Fun and Fortune: Exploring Motivational Factors and Moderating Effects in Chinese Crowdsourcing Contest

Crowdsourcing is known as a problem-solving strategy enabled by Web 2.0 evolution and socio-technical systems. Crowdsourcing contest is a typical case of crowdsourcing and has been adopted by many organizations for business solution and decision-making. From a participant’s perspective, it is interesting to explore what motivates people to participate in crowdsourcing contest. The focus of this study is to investigate the category of motivation based on self-determination theory and synthesizes various motivation factors in crowdsourcing contest. Meanwhile, motivational affordances and task granularity are also examined as the moderate constructs. The paper builds a conceptual model to illustrate the relationships between various motivations and participation effort under the moderating of motivational affordances and task granularity. An empirical study is conducted to test our research model by surveying the Chinese participants of crowdsourcing contest. Overall, our study may conceptually and theoretically contribute to the literatures and yield some practical implications for sponsors, managers, and designers in crowdsourcing contest.