Management Science · 2025 · Konstantinos I. Stouras、Sanjiv Erat、Kenneth C. Lichtendahl
中文摘要
众包平台通常采取被动方式:让相互竞争的企业自由设计各自的竞赛,并允许每位求解者自行选择加入任何同时进行的竞赛。在一个相互竞争的噪声驱动竞赛模型中,我们发现,与垄断竞赛设计者相比,双寡头的奖金配置所设奖品更少(但单笔奖金更大)。我们还发现,由企业自选预算且求解者内生参与的竞赛会造成协调无效率。因此,那些限制相互竞争的企业自由选择预算、并就特定噪声驱动竞赛向求解者提供不具强制力建议的平台政策,能够严格增进总福利。将框架扩展至包含任意相关的能力驱动竞赛后,我们强调竞赛间依赖性对平台干预效果的关键作用。具体而言,只有当各竞赛之间充分相关时,平台为改善求解者与竞赛(错)配而施加的助推才能增进福利;否则,允许求解者自我匹配才是恰当的做法。
Abstract
Crowdsourcing platforms typically take a passive approach, and they let the competing firms freely design their own contests and allow every solver to self-select and join any of the concurrently running contests. In a model of competing noise-driven contests, we show that the duopoly prize allocation has fewer (but larger) prizes compared with a monopolist contest designer. We also find that contests with firm-chosen budgets and solvers’ endogenous participation create coordination inefficiencies. Thus, platform policies that constrain the competing firms from freely choosing their budgets and offer solvers non-enforceable recommendations toward specific noise-driven contests strictly enhance total welfare. Extending our framework to include arbitrarily correlated ability-driven contests, we highlight the critical role of inter-contest dependence on the efficacy of a platform’s interventions. Specifically, platform nudges to improve solver-contest (mis)matches are welfare enhancing only when the contests are sufficiently related, and allowing solvers to self-sort is appropriate otherwise.