Co-Opetition in Crowdsourcing Challenges: Comment Network Dynamics and Relational Homophily Among Contestants in Crowdsourcing Challenge Communities

Situated in a creative crowdsourcing challenge organizational community, this research examines how different types of homophily affect network formation among ideators, the challenge innovators. Longitudinal analysis of comment network events among ideators was conducted with relational event models. Status homophily was examined based on ideators’ self-reported public profiles. Findings show that ideators’ location by country significantly influences relational events, but occupational homophily did not. Value homophily was examined based on the content similarity of ideators’ idea submissions. Results indicate that ideator’s choices of platform content categories, those that are designed by the challenge management, significantly influenced ideators’ communication patterns. Specifically, long-term needs were a salient homophily factor among platform categories, whereas short-term needs were heterophilous factors. Finally, a multidimensional homophily measurement using latent class analysis on idea-category-submission patterns predicted the occurrences of communication relational events and achieved an improved model fit compared to modeling all platform categories together.