THE ROLE OF QUICK RESPONSE IN CROWDSOURCING COMPANIES FACING STRATEGIC CONSUMERS

Influenced by the recent success of Threadless, "community design" strategy is increasingly adopted in fashion and packaging industries. Under this strategy, a company asks consumers to contribute to product value via an online platform. This study identifies a drawback of community design and provides a solution. We develop models to compare the performance under this strategy with an "enhanced design" firm, which achieves design enhancement by the company's own effort. We find that, when strategic customer behaviour and demand uncertainty are significant, community design may underperform enhanced design. Then, we find that quick response significantly complements community design, and their compound strategy performs very well under uncertain demand and strategic customer behaviour. This complementarity is more announced than that between quick response and enhanced design. These results suggest that quick response is critical to the success of community design companies.