Creativity Contests: An Experimental Investigation of Eliciting Employee Creativity
通过实验研究竞赛设计（评审者角色和奖项数量）对员工参与行为和创意质量的影响，发现同行评审能增加创意数量和质量，而增加奖项数量虽能促进弱势群体参与但会降低创意质量。
ABSTRACT Running a contest can help managers elicit creative ideas from employees by providing employees with incentives to develop and share ideas that will help the firm. Little is known, however, about how contest design affects the outcomes of subjectively evaluated creativity‐based contests. We conduct an experiment to investigate the impact of two contest design choices, the job role of the contest's evaluator, and the number of prizes that participants compete for, on employee participation behavior. We also examine how these contest design choices impact the creativity of the submitted ideas. We find that using a peer of the employees as an evaluator increases the number of ideas shared, but it does not impact the number of unique participants who enter the contest. In addition, we find that using peer evaluators leads to an increase in the creativity of the ideas. We find that awarding more prizes to participants does not increase overall participation, but it does increase the number of ideas shared by employees from underrepresented demographics. Awarding more prizes, however, reduces the creativity of the ideas. Together, these results show that contest design choices have an important impact on employee creative idea‐sharing and that managers should carefully consider how to tailor contests to fit their firms' needs.