"Does god play dice?" Randomness vs. deterministic explanations of idea originality in crowdsourcing

Description

Which factors are responsible for the success of crowdsourcing tournaments? Extant research appears to assume that there is a deterministic relationship between factors such as the organization of the tournament, characteristics of the participants attracted, and specific situational factors on the one hand and the quality of their contributions gained on the other. We introduce the alternative idea that in fact the originality of any participants? idea is largely random and thus the success of the tournament rests on the number of participants attracted. In order to compare the explanatory power of randomness and 22 deterministic factors derived from literature we conducted a huge experiment in which 1,089 participants developed ideas for apps. Our finding is crystal clear: randomness outperforms deterministic explanations by over 500%. It appears that at least in crowdsouring, God indeed plays dice.

Period	17 Jun 2013 → 19 Jun 2013
Event title	DRUID Conference
Event type	Unknown
Degree of Recognition	International