A Study on the Synergy Incentive Mechanism for Knowledge Contribution Behavior of Service Providers in Crowdsourcing Platform
As an important carrier for aggregating group wisdom,the key to achieve sustainable development of crowd-sourcing platform and create value in it lies in the design of effective incentives to motivate service providers,to continuously contribute high-quality knowledge.However,existing studies usually design incentives from a static or single perspective,which is difficult to meet the diversified needs of service providers and cannot adapt to the dynamic internal and external envir-onment of crowdsourcing platforms.In view of this,it is necessary to explore the synergy incentives in crowdsourcing plat-forms and their impact on the knowledge contribution behavior of service providers from the perspective of collaborative evol-ution.Drawing on social cognitive theory and self-determination theory,this study examines the incentive practices employed by Pig Bajie Network.Following the research logic of"antecedent-process-result",it adopts a longitudinal exploratory single case study method to explore the synergy incentives and their effects on cognition and knowledge contribution behaviors of service providers in different development stages of crowdsourcing platforms.On this basis,this study summarizes the dynam-ic evolution of the synergy incentives in the crowdsourcing platform and analyzes the action paths which different synergy in-centive elements promote knowledge contribution behavior of service providers.It is found that with the development of crowdsourcing platforms,the synergy incentives have experienced three states of"explicit and implicit incentive collaboration-explicit,implicit,and active incentive collaboration-explicit,implicit,active,and emergent incentive collaboration".Explicit,implicit,active and emergent incentives are characterized by heterogeneous incentive paths and asymmetric incentive effects.Moreover,the synergistic effect among different incentive elements is achieved through the association of four incentive branches.The first incentive branch is the linkage between explicit incent-ives and service providers'external goal pursuits which drive the generation of knowledge contribution behaviors.Second is the linkage between implicit incentives and the outcome expectations of service providers in order to increase the involvement of their knowledge contribution behaviors.Third is the linkage between active incentives and service providers'self-efficacy and internal goal pursuit to further enhance the involvement of their knowledge contribution behaviors.Fourth is the linkage between emergent incentives and the emotional commitment of service providers to enhance the involvement and stability of their knowledge contribution behaviors.On this basis,this research has found that synergy incentive elements amplify the in-centive effect of a single path layer by layer through different action paths,in order to achieve synergistic effects.This study can contribute to the research gap caused by the lack of the existing literature on the process consideration of synergy incentives and open the"black box"of synergy incentive elements.The findings of the study can provide theoretical and practical guidance for crowdsourcing platforms to design scientific and reasonable synergy incentives and dynamically ad-just them,in order to better motivate service providers to continuously contribute high-quality knowledge resources,and thus realize the high-quality development of crowdsourcing platforms.
synergy incentive mechanismcrowdsourcing platformknowledge contribution behaviorsco-evolutionaction path of incentives
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
