Competition and Collaboration in Crowdsourcing Communities: What Happens when Peers Evaluate Each Other?

Crowdsourcing has evolved as an organizational approach to distributedproblem solving and innovation. As contests are embedded in online communitiesand evaluation rights are assigned to the crowd, community members face atension: they find themselves exposed to both competitive motives to win thecontest prize and collaborative participation motives in the community. Thecompetitive motive suggests they may evaluate rivals strategically according totheir self-interest, the collaborative motive suggests they may evaluate theirpeers truthfully according to mutual interest. Using field data from Threadlesson 38 million peer evaluations of more than 150,000 submissions across 75,000individuals over 10 years and two natural experiments to rule out alternativeexplanations, we answer the question of how community members resolve thistension. We show that as their skill level increases, they become increasinglycompetitive and shift from using self-promotion to sabotaging their closestcompetitors. However, we also find signs of collaborative behavior whenhigh-skilled members show leniency toward those community members who do notdirectly threaten their chance of winning. We explain how the individual-leveluse of strategic evaluations translates into important organizational-leveloutcomes by affecting the community structure through individuals' long-termparticipation. While low-skill targets of sabotage are less likely toparticipate in future contests, high-skill targets are more likely. Thissuggests a feedback loop between competitive evaluation behavior and futureparticipation. These findings have important implications for the literature oncrowdsourcing design, and the evolution and sustainability of crowdsourcingcommunities.