Revealing or Concealing: How Legal and Psychological Ownership Matter in Crowdsourcing Contests
J. Nils Foege, Sebastian Schaefer, David Antons, Dirk Lüttgens, Erk P. Piening, Torsten Oliver Salge · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2016
Despite the growing interest in crowdsourcing, little is known about the challenges that solving individuals face. In particular, solvers need to strike a delicate balance between sufficiently revealing knowledge to win the contest and concealing enough to avoid unintended knowledge spillovers and value expropriation by the recipient. In this study, we seek to contribute to the literature by shedding light on the antecedents of knowledge revealing. We argue that individuals’ ownership configurations (i.e., strength of legal and psychological ownership) determine subsequent revealing strategies. Results from our analyses of 1,149 solvers participating in crowdsourcing for technical solutions indicate that both legal and psychological ownership play an important role for an individual’s decision to reveal or conceal knowledge. In particular, we find that the strength of legal ownership is associated with an increased willingness to reveal facts and theories, while strong psychological ownership is related to both factual and procedural knowledge revealing. These findings have important theoretical as well as practical implications for solvers, seekers, and intermediaries.