Prof. Dr. Lars Hornuf will present his paper "How Community Managers Affect Online Idea Crowdsourcing Activities” at the CESifo Area Conference on Economics of Digitization 2020. In associated working paper, he investigates with his coauthor Prof. Dr. Sabrina Jeworrek from IWH Halle, whether and to what extent community managers in online collaborative communities can stimulate crowd activities through their engagement. Using a novel data set of 22 large online idea crowdsourcing campaigns, the authors find that active engagement of community managers positively affects crowd activities in an inverted U-shaped manner.

Moreover, they evidence that intellectual stimulation by managers increases community participation, while individual consideration of users has no impact on user activities. Finally, the data reveal that community manager activities that require more effort, such as media file uploads instead of simple written comments, have a larger effect on crowd participation.

The full article can be downloaded here.