Lone Wolf or Wolf Pack: How Does Task Specificity Influence Crowdsourcing?

As firms increasingly rely on security crowdsourcing platforms, they face challenges in attracting and retaining experts. This study applies Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) to investigate how task specificity and collaboration impact the number of resolved vulnerability reports. From the relational governance perspective, we extend TCE by introducing collaboration as a moderating factor in the relationship between task specificity and reports resolved. Using a dataset of 11,400 experts participating in 440 public programs over 11 years, we employ a negative binomial regression model to analyze the relationship. Our findings indicate that task specificity reduces the number of resolved reports, while allowing collaboration among experts can mitigate the negative effect of task specificity on the number of reports resolved, highlighting the urgency of facilitating collaboration, especially for high specificity tasks. This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of security crowdsourcing economics and provides practical implications for firms seeking to optimize crowdsourcing outcomes.