The influence of intellectual property rights protection on contribution efforts of participants in online crowdsourcing contests

Although crowdsourcing is ubiquitous, it is unclear what factors affect the quality of contributions by participants in crowdsourcing activities. This study attempts to understand the mechanism of how perceived intellectual property rights (IPR) protection influences participant's contribution effort in crowdsourcing contests by analyzing the mediating role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the moderating role of task complexity. For this purpose, data were collected through an online survey from members of a major crowdsourcing platform for seeking innovative solutions to problems across various industries. Partial least square based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) is employed for analyzing the data. The results show the new findings that (1) both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation influence contribution effort and the effect of extrinsic motivation is stronger; (2) IPR protection does not influence the contribution efforts of participants directly but indirectly via extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic motivation; (3) the importance of IPR protection holds irrespective of the gender of the participants and the complexity of the task. The results indicate that a one-time prize might be insufficient for the participants to exert their full efforts in crowdsourcing contests if the resulting IPRs are not protected.