Being a Solo Endeavor or Team Worker in Crowdsourcing Contests? It is a Long-term Decision You Need to Make

Abstract

Workers in crowdsourcing are evolving from one-off, independent micro-workers to on-demand collaborators with a long-term orientation. They were expected to collaborate as transient teams to solve more complex, non-trivial tasks. However, collaboration as a team may not be as prevalent as possible, given the lack of support for synchronous collaboration and the "competition, collaboration but transient" nature of crowdsourcing. Aiming at unfolding how individuals collaborate as a transient team and how such teamwork can affect an individual's long-term success, this study investigates the individuals' collaborations on Kaggle, a crowdsourcing contest platform for data analysis. The analysis reveals a growing trend of collaborating as a transient team, which is influenced by contest designs like complexity and reward. However, compared with working independently, the surplus of teamwork in a contest varies over time. Furthermore, the teamwork experience is beneficial for individuals in the short term and long term. Our study distinguishes the team-related intellectual capital and solo-related intellectual capital, and finds a path dependency effect for the individual to work solely or collectively. These findings allow us to contribute insights into the collaborative strategies for crowd workers, contest designers, and platform operators like Kaggle.