Are Individual Users Who Have Succeeded in Crowdsourcing More Valuable

It is often believed that individual users in crowdsourcing communities who have succeeded in generating ideas are more valuable. By using a formal analytical model based on the theory of sequential search, however, we find that those users who had high past success rate are not without a diminishing value in their future idea generation. This is because lower search cost associated with high past success rate has a curvilinear effect on the success rate, as it reduces the search effort of a user and other users on the one hand and increases the relative value of a user’s ideas on the other. Such cognitive constraint of users, however, can be at least partly resolved by the often-overlooked co-development efforts from other users in the community. Empirical data from Dell IdeaStorm provides supportive evidence for these predictions from our model. Taken together, our study offers new insights on how a user’s cost structure influences his future success of ideation.