Understanding Two-Stage Balance of Competitive Bidding in Crowdsourcing: A Response Surface Analysis

The rapid growth of crowdsourcing platforms grants unprecedented opportunities to clients to procure services digitally. Clients typically solicit solutions via competitive bidding, wherein they outline their requirements in task descriptions, and bidders respond with bidding proposals. Yet, prior research has not achieved consensus on how characteristics of task descriptions impact bidding outcomes with scholarly debates persisting with regard to whether conformity or serendipity of proposals is determinative in competitive bidding. To bridge these knowledge gaps, we advance a research model aimed at disentangling the two-stage balance of competitive bidding in crowdsourcing context. Analytical results attest to a positive effect of the incongruence of task description characteristics on conformity and serendipity of candidate solutions, with task appeal and client reputation serving as moderators. Implications for theory and practice based on the empirical findings were discussed.