UCL School of Management Associate Professor Ersin Korpeoglu and PhD student Ramazan Kizilyildirim have recently been named as finalists in the 2025 Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) College of Product Innovation and Technology Management (PITM) Best Student Paper Competition.
Entitled “Solver Capacity Utilisation and Allocation on Crowdsourcing Platforms: An Experimental Study”, the paper was co-authored with Dr. Gizem Korpeoglu from Eindhoven University of Technology and Professor Mirko Kremer from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management.
The research examines how solvers on crowdsourcing platforms manage their limited capacity—constrained by resources—and allocate their efforts across multiple contests, factoring in the effects of uncertainty and platform growth. This question is pivotal in the context of crowdsourcing and innovation contests, where organisations seek innovative solutions from a diverse pool of independent solvers.
Through a combination of game-theoretic modelling and controlled laboratory experiments, the authors reveal that solvers consistently deviate from expected effort levels. Solvers underutilise their capacity, with this underutilisation being more pronounced when they participate in fewer contests. Moreover, solvers tend to focus on fewer contests than expected, a behaviour that helps organisers offset the anticipated effort loss in multi-contest settings. The authors attribute these deviations to behavioural tendencies influencing solvers’ effort allocation, showing that incorporating these tendencies into models significantly enhances predictive accuracy.
This research provides critical insights into how platform growth shapes solver behaviour, offering practical implications for businesses, government agencies, and non-profits that use crowdsourcing and innovation contests to address challenges requiring creative solutions. The team will present their paper at the 2025 POMS Annual Conference next month in Atlanta, Georgia.
Discussing the achievement, Ramazan said, ‘We are honoured by this recognition and eagerly await the final decision in April.’
