Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Team Collaboration in Innovation Contests

2020; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.2139/ssrn.3607769

1556-5068

Sıdıka Tunç Candoğan, C. Gizem Korpeoglu, Christopher S. Tang,

Innovation Diffusion and Forecasting

In an innovation contest, an organizer elicits solutions to an innovation-related problem from a group of solvers. Although solvers are capable of developing solutions individually and making individual submissions, if the organizer encourages collaboration, solvers may collaborate as teams and make team submissions. Motivated from different policies adopted by crowdsourcing platforms (e.g., InnoCentive, Topcoder, and 99designs), we identify conditions under which the organizer can benefit from team submissions. By examining equilibrium outcomes of game-theoretic models, we show, interestingly, that when the organizer seeks high-novelty solutions to a nondecomposable problem (e.g., design challenges at InnoCentive), the organizer can benefit from team submissions despite the decrease in solvers' efforts. Yet, when the organizer seeks low-novelty solutions to a nondecomposable problem (e.g., logo design challenges at 99designs), the organizer may not benefit from team submissions unless teams are highly diverse. We further show that when the organizer seeks low-novelty or high-novelty solutions to a decomposable problem (e.g., software challenges at Topcoder), the organizer can benefit from team submissions, but interestingly, only under certain conditions. Finally, we identify conditions under which solvers can benefit from collaborating as teams because the organizer's benefit from team submissions hinges upon solvers' decisions. We show that solvers can benefit from team collaboration in the absence of substantial synergistic gains, because without such gains, team collaboration decreases each solver's effort and hence cost in equilibrium.