Online collaborations allow teams to pool knowledge from multiple domains, often across dispersed geographic locations to find innovative solutions for complex, multi-faceted problems. However, motivating individuals within online groups can prove difficult, as individual contributions are easily missed or forgotten. This study introduces the concept of creative ancestry, which describes the extent to which collaborative outputs can be traced back to the individual contributions that preceded them. We build a laboratory experiment to demonstrate the impact of creative ancestry on perceptions of fairness and output quality in online collaborations. Results from this experiment suggest the addition of creative ancestry has a positive impact on these variables and is associated with increasing perceptions of procedural justice and possibly interactional and distributive justice, dependent on the level of perceived creativity and cognitive consensus.

在线协作允许团队汇集来自多个领域的知识，通常跨越分散的地理位置，为复杂的、多方面的问题找到创新的解决方案。然而，激励在线群组中的个人可能很困难，因为个人贡献很容易被遗漏或遗忘。本研究引入了创造性祖先的概念，它描述了协作输出可以追溯到在它们之前的个人贡献的程度。我们建立了一个实验室实验，以证明创意血统对在线协作中的公平性和输出质量的看法的影响。