A Geography of Participation in IT-Mediated Crowds John Prpić Prashant Shukla Yannig Roth Beedie School of Business, Beedie School of Business, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Simon Fraser University Simon Fraser University Sorbonne (PRISM)
[email protected] Rotman School of Management,
[email protected] University of Toronto
[email protected] Jean-François Lemoine ESSCA Ecole de Management Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne (PRISM)
[email protected] Abstract the global distribution of crowd participants at crowdsourcing platforms like eYeka, TopCoder, and In this work we seek to understand how differences Tongal, research has yet to emerge that empirically in location effect participation outcomes in IT- investigates the role of crowd member geography on mediated crowds. To do so, we operationalize Crowd crowdsourcing participation. Capital Theory with data from a popular international creative crowdsourcing site, to determine whether To achieve these aims we bound our investigation regional differences exist in crowdsourcing using Crowd Capital Theory (CCT) as our theoretical participation outcomes. We present the results of our framework, which draws upon the knowledge-based investigation from data encompassing 1,858,202 view of organizations to explain how and why IT- observations from 28,214 crowd members on 94 mediated crowds can generate value for organizations different projects in 2012. Using probit regressions to [6]. In this study, we operationalize CCT with data isolate geographic effects by continental region, we provided to us by a leading global crowdsourcing find significant variation across regions in platform which hosts crowdsourcing contests on crowdsourcing participation. In doing so, we behalf of major corporations. These contests are contribute to the literature by illustrating that visible to anyone with internet access, and geography matters in respect to crowd participation.