The effect of linguistic style on solvers’ success? An empirical analysis in a crowdsourcing community

Abstract

Purpose: Prior crowdsourcing literature has highlighted that communication among peers within the crowdsourcing community matters since it affects the solvers’ success. Particularly, previous scholars have focused on how the volume and the content of communications among solvers improve their creativity and likelihood of winning crowdsourcing contests. This study aims to understand whether, alongside these two communication dimensions, the linguistic style of solvers’ communications (i.e. how solvers write things) permits them to promote their qualities in seekers’ eyes and emerge from the crowd. Design/methodology/approach: Empirically, we collected data from a sample of 1866 solvers within the community of the 99designs crowdsourcing platform to build an ad-hoc dataset and test our hypotheses by running an econometric analysis. Findings: Our results show that by posting comments of moderate length and prudent complexity, characterized by positive language and an other-oriented perspective, solvers can signal their capabilities and skills to increase their likelihood of succeeding in crowdsourcing contests. Originality/value: This research’s findings contribute to prior crowdsourcing literature, which has so far exclusively focused on the linguistic style used by seekers when drafting the requests for proposals of their competitions. Moreover, the paper offers practical guidance for both solvers and seekers, suggesting how to leverage peer communications in crowdsourcing contests.