Crowdsourcing has evolved as an organizational approach to distributed problem solving and innovation. As contests are embedded in online communities and evaluation rights are assigned to the crowd, community members face a tension: they find themselves exposed to both competitive motives to win the contest prize and collaborative participation motives in the community. The competitive motive suggests they may evaluate rivals strategically according to their self-interest, the collaborative motive suggests they may evaluate their peers truthfully according to mutual interest. Using field data from Threadless on 38 million peer evaluations of more than 150,000 submissions across 75,000 individuals over 10 years and two natural experiments to rule out alternative explanations, we answer the question of how community members resolve this tension. We show that as their skill level increases, they become increasingly competitive and shift from using self-promotion to sabotaging their closest competitors. However, we also find signs of collaborative behavior when high-skilled members show leniency toward those community members who do not directly threaten their chance of winning. We explain how the individual-level use of strategic evaluations translates into important organizational-level outcomes by affecting the community structure through individuals' long-term participation. While low-skill targets of sabotage are less likely to participate in future contests, high-skill targets are more likely. This suggests a feedback loop between competitive evaluation behavior and future participation. These findings have important implications for the literature on crowdsourcing design, and the evolution and sustainability of crowdsourcing communities.

翻译：众包已成为分布式问题解决与创新的一种组织方式。当竞赛嵌入在线社区且评估权被赋予大众时，社区成员面临一种张力：他们既怀有赢得竞赛奖金的竞争动机，又兼具参与社区协作的共享动机。竞争动机促使他们可能根据自身利益策略性地评估对手，而协作动机则驱使他们根据共同利益诚实地评价同伴。基于Threadless平台涵盖10年间7.5万名用户对15万份提交作品产生的3800万次同行评价数据，并结合两项自然实验排除替代性解释，我们探究了社区成员如何化解这一张力。研究表明：随着技能水平的提高，用户竞争性逐渐增强，行为策略从自我推广转向破坏最接近的竞争对手。但我们也发现了协作行为的迹象——高技能成员对那些不直接威胁其获胜机会的社区成员表现出宽容。我们解释了个人层面的策略性评价如何通过影响个体的长期参与来改变社区结构，进而转化为重要的组织层面结果：低技能的被破坏者未来参与竞赛的概率降低，而高技能被破坏者的参与概率反而上升。这表明竞争性评价行为与未来参与之间存在反馈循环。这些发现对众包设计理论以及众包社区的演化与可持续性研究具有重要启示。