Is This the Right Time to Post My Task? An Empirical Analysis on a Task Similarity Arrival in TopCoder
This addresses task owners' strategic planning needs in crowdsourcing platforms, offering incremental insights for optimizing task posting timing and similarity management.
The study analyzed how the arrival of similar tasks on the TopCoder platform affects task success and worker performance, finding that a higher number of tasks with over 70% similarity reduces competition, while arriving tasks into a pool with 60% similarity maximizes the chance of receiving valid submissions.
Existed studies have shown that crowd workers are more interested in taking similar tasks in terms of context, field, and required technology, rather than tasks from the same project. Therefore, it is important for task owners to not only be able to plan 'when the new task should arrive?' but also, to justify 'what the strategic task arrival plan should be?' in order to receive a valid submission for the posted task. To address these questions this research reports an empirical analysis on the impact of similar task arrival in the platform, on both tasks' success level and workers' performance. Our study supports that 1- A higher number of arrival tasks with similarity level greater than 70% will negatively impact on task competition level, 2- A bigger pool of similar open and arrival tasks would lead to lower worker attraction and elasticity, and 3- Workers who register for tasks with lower similarity level are more reliable to make a valid submission and 4- arriving task to the pool of 60% similar task will provide the highest chance of receiving a valid submission.