Firms increasingly use human crowds to solve their innovation related needs. Innovation sourcing managers who sponsor innovation contests seek to maximize crowd size to increase the chance of creative outcomes. One strategy they use is to set an award size. Although many studies have examined the influence of award size on crowd size in innovation contests, the empirical findings are inconsistent and suggest further empirical study is needed. Drawing from expectancy-value theory, we propose that award size and crowd size are related to one another in the form of an inverted U-shape, namely that moderate awards maximize crowd size. Additional propositions cover contingencies around the number of awards and task difficulty of an innovation contest. Based on data representing 5342 programming innovation contests, our empirical analyses confirm the inverted U-shaped relationship and indicate that the number of awards and task difficulty steepen the inverted U-shaped relationship. These results add nuanced, theoretical understanding of how innovation contests work. The findings indicate that innovation sourcing managers should set award sizes at moderate levels, and that they should experiment with slightly larger or smaller awards to see if it impacts crowd size in their context.

中文翻译：

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大奖项真的对求解者有吸引力吗？创新竞赛中奖项规模对人群规模的影响

公司越来越多地利用人群来解决与创新相关的需求。赞助创新竞赛的创新采购经理寻求最大限度地扩大人群规模，以增加创新成果的机会。他们使用的一种策略是设定奖励规模。尽管许多研究已经研究了奖励规模对创新竞赛中人群规模的影响，但实证结果不一致，表明需要进一步的实证研究。根据期望值理论，我们提出奖励规模和人群规模以倒 U 形的形式相互关联，即适度的奖励最大化人群规模。其他命题涵盖围绕创新竞赛的奖项数量和任务难度的突发事件。基于代表 5342 场编程创新大赛的数据，我们的实证分析证实了倒 U 型关系，并表明奖励数量和任务难度使倒 U 型关系变得陡峭。这些结果增加了对创新竞赛如何运作的细致入微的理论理解。调查结果表明，创新采购经理应该将奖励规模设置在适中的水平，并且他们应该尝试稍微大一点或小一点的奖励，看看它是否会在他们的环境中影响人群规模。