Crowdsourcing contests

In a crowdsourcing contest a requester posts a task (e.g. logo design, programming task) on a platform and announces a monetary reward that he is willing to pay for a winning solution. Contestants (e.g. designers or programmers) submit solutions on the platform and the requester chooses the best solution (possibly more than one) and awards the prize. On-line platforms for crowdsourcing contests are already abundant and growing rapidly in market size. In this survey we present two streams of literature that study crowdsourcing contests. The first is theoretical research, which tries to capture the characteristics of these contests, describe them as a game and then analyze the equilibrium behavior of contestants. The second is the empirical research which collects crowdsourcing data and analyzes the behavior of the contestants in these platforms. The aim of this survey is to clarify the current status of the research of incentives and behavior of contestants, organizers and the platform in crowdsourcing contests and to highlight the many questions that are still open.