TY - JOUR
T1 - Stochastic Sequential Allocations for Creative Crowdsourcing
AU - Tian, Xuhan
AU - Shi, Junmin
AU - Qi, Xiangtong
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors are grateful to the Department Editor, Dr. Vijay Mookerjee, the Senior Editor, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments. This work is partly supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, General Research Fund [Grant 16225316]. The second author is supported in part by the USDA grant (Agreement No. 21‐TMTSD‐WI‐0010) and Leir Research Institute (LRI) at NJIT, and he is also grateful for the Hurlburt Chair endowment. 1
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Production and Operations Management Society
PY - 2022/2
Y1 - 2022/2
N2 - Creative crowdsourcing is an innovative online business model in which a platform marshals independent professionals (e.g., designers) to conduct creative work projects. Typically, clients submit project requests stochastically to a platform which possesses a pool of registered designers. For each submitted project, designers decide whether to participate and attempt to submit a design, and the client either chooses a winner among all submissions, or rejects them all, based on subjective criteria. In general, platforms cannot control individual designers directly because of the nature of the freelance market, incurring possible mismatches between designers and arriving projects. To tackle the problem, we present a dynamic control policy applied to the maximum number of participants for each arrived project. Our study reveals that the optimal policy follows an inverted-U-shaped function of the project value, highlighting the importance of applying a stronger restriction on the number of participants for some sufficiently high-valued projects. In addition, the optimal policy we have developed allows the platform to gain higher rewards judiciously even when the market is more volatile. Furthermore, extensive numerical studies have been conducted to glean managerial insights. Specifically, the optimal policy becomes more beneficial even when more designers are available, which is counter-intuitive to the common-sense notion that control should be more valuable when designers are scarcer; and the optimal policy is further shown to be robust when the objective is changed from maximizing the total reward to maximizing the total number of successful projects.
AB - Creative crowdsourcing is an innovative online business model in which a platform marshals independent professionals (e.g., designers) to conduct creative work projects. Typically, clients submit project requests stochastically to a platform which possesses a pool of registered designers. For each submitted project, designers decide whether to participate and attempt to submit a design, and the client either chooses a winner among all submissions, or rejects them all, based on subjective criteria. In general, platforms cannot control individual designers directly because of the nature of the freelance market, incurring possible mismatches between designers and arriving projects. To tackle the problem, we present a dynamic control policy applied to the maximum number of participants for each arrived project. Our study reveals that the optimal policy follows an inverted-U-shaped function of the project value, highlighting the importance of applying a stronger restriction on the number of participants for some sufficiently high-valued projects. In addition, the optimal policy we have developed allows the platform to gain higher rewards judiciously even when the market is more volatile. Furthermore, extensive numerical studies have been conducted to glean managerial insights. Specifically, the optimal policy becomes more beneficial even when more designers are available, which is counter-intuitive to the common-sense notion that control should be more valuable when designers are scarcer; and the optimal policy is further shown to be robust when the objective is changed from maximizing the total reward to maximizing the total number of successful projects.
KW - creative crowdsourcing
KW - design and designer
KW - dynamic programming
KW - sharing economy
KW - stochastic sequential allocation
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U2 - 10.1111/poms.13573
DO - 10.1111/poms.13573
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85118410113
SN - 1059-1478
VL - 31
SP - 697
EP - 714
JO - Production and Operations Management
JF - Production and Operations Management
IS - 2
ER -