Innovation contests within firms offer the potential to tap latent employee expertise across the organization, and expand innovation beyond the core R&D teams. Still, firms undertaking an internal contest, unlike the more commonly studied external contests, incur significant opportunity costs...

In any pool of ideas, it is often the case that a small fraction of top ideas have significantly higher quality, both in absolute terms and relative to other ideas in the pool. This study formulates a model of idea pools, and examines the impact of the “structure” of idea pools on the extent...

In many industries, consumers who purchase services pay a fixed upfront fee for access, and then consume that service over a period of time. In this paper, we examine the implications of this temporal separation of purchase and consumption on a user's consumption choices, and on the firm's...

Crowdsourcing platforms typically take a passive approach and let solvers self-select which (if any) of the concurrently running contests they wish to participate into. Thus, firms which set prizes and organize contests on these platforms are competing among themselves (for solver participation...