Cryptocurrency Rewards and Crowdsourcing Task Success

Abstract

Crowdsourcing task success depends on the contributions of developers. How to identify capable developers and motivate them to actively contribute to a task is a challenging issue. This study investigates how the use of cryptocurrency rewards, i.e., the choices of stablecoins and unstablecoins affects the crowdsourcing task success, and how the relationship depends on task difficulty. Based on 3858 crowdsourcing tasks, we find that the use of unstablecoins reduces the number of participating contributors and extends the time period of having the first contributor, but has no significant effect on the likelihood of task success. In addition, task difficulty alleviates the negative effect of the unstablecoins on the number of participants. Our study potentially provides important implications for the use of cryptocurrency tokens as task rewards.