Solvers' committed resources in crowdsourcing marketplace: do task design characteristics matter?

It has become pervasive in the contemporary world that organisations leverage crowdsourcing to solicit ideas or innovations from the public. However, challenges exist in how to design tasks in an appropriate way to stimulate crowdsourcees' investing more resources in crowdsourcing activities. Motivated thus, draw on the valence theory, we propose a model to explain the influence of task design characteristics on solvers' committed resources with the consideration of the mediating role of task difficulty-significance factors. The model was assessed by using data collected from 274 crowdsourcees on two large Chinese crowdsourcing platforms. As hypothesised, crowdsourcing type, deadline, task incentives and task volume are found to positively affect perceived task significance, whereas crowdsourcing type and deadline negatively impact perceived task difficulty, personality has an indirect impact on perceived task significance by effectively enhancing solvers' positive traits and alleviating their vulnerable attitudes. In addition, we find that perceived task significance partially mediates the effect of task design and committed resources, while perceived task difficulty mediates the associations between crowdsourcing type, deadline and committed resource. The theoretical contributions and practical implications are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]