Do Achievement Goals and Work Nature Affect Contributor Performance in Gamified Crowdsourcing? An Exploratory Study in an Academic Setting

Abstract

Many studies have demonstrated the benefits of gamification in the context of crowdsourcing. However, not every user benefits equally from gamification. Most of the current studies focused on the game elements of gamified systems. Scant attention has been paid to the factors related to the users (Koivisto and Hamari 2014; Morschheuser et al. 2016). University students will be recruited to trial a gamified crowdsourcing system for two weeks. Our study aims to explore whether achievement goal orientations influence user performance in gamified crowdsourcing systems. In addition, certain types of crowdsourcing require creativity, whereas tasks of other types of crowdsourcing can be done mechanically. The achievement goals may also affect user performance in different tasks. Our study explores whether users’ achievement goals affect their performance in homogeneous and heterogeneous tasks respectively in the context of gamified crowdsourcing. Results of our study will contribute to the expanding literature on whether gamification works on all people. The results will also help us understand more about the behavior of users with different achievement goals in gamified crowdsourcing systems.