Motivation and Incentives for Crowd Participation in web 2.0. A field experiment for the ORCHESTRA Community

Purpose - This study presents some evidence of an ongoing research on smart city platforms. Our analysis is part of the Italian research project OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A (ORganization of Cultural HEritage for Smart Tourism and Real-time Accessibility) meant to develop a crowdsourcing community in the city of Naples (Italy). Successful crowdsourcing solutions require activities that both fulfill the communities administrators' needs and - by utilizing various motivation mechanisms - account for individual contributors' needs. Thus, understanding and analyzing the incentives that spur users to contribute are critical to designing crowdsourcing applications (Cuel and Zamarian, 2014). In this study we set up a field experiment, in order to understand which types of incentives are useful to engage users to produce contents for OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A and better address a specific behavior. Methodology - In order to understand the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation with respect to individual behaviours, we administrate a questionnaire to university students related to their education and cultural background and consumptions, and social status, their internet usages, and we follow their behaviour on the OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A community. We explore through multivariate methods the characteristics of our users looking for clusters. Furthermore through our hypothesis we test the impact of the two different motivations taking into account some of the relevant individual behaviours. Originality/value - Our contribution is to provide reflections on extrinsic and intrinsic incentive mechanisms, in order to explore the extent to which incentives are able to engage and to motivate users in community building processes. Second, through the field experiment we shed light on a partly jagged topic and we provide some normative suggestions on how to design a crowdsourcing application. In particular, we try to explain results and emerging issue needed to create a model of incentive mechanisms that could be used in the OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A web platform. Practical implications - OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A falls within the field "Smart Culture and Tourism" and is part of several valorisation projects of the city of Naples. The community aims to be a benchmark of the production of UGC, the engage of the crowd and the users interaction. Many touristic and cultural communities began huge business all over the world thanks to user-generated contents. In fact over the years it has become clear that users handle the review tool for the destinations they visit or for commercial products and services, and for supporting or criticizing the hospitality of some structures.