Information technology is being increasingly employed to harness
under-utilized resources via more effective coordination. This progress
has manifested in different developments, for instance, crowdsourcing
(e.g. Wikipedia, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and Waze), crowdfunding (e.g.
Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and RocketHub) or the sharing economy (e.g.
Uber, Airbnb, and Didi Chuxing). Since the sustainability of these
IT-enabled forms of resource coordination do not commonly rely merely on
direct economic benefits of the participants, but also on other
non-monetary, intrinsic gratifications, such systems are increasingly gamified
that is, designers use features of games to induce enjoyment and
general autotelicy of the activity. However, a key problem in
gamification design has been whether it is better to use
competition-based or cooperation-based designs. We examine this question
through a field experiment in a gamified crowdsourcing system,
employing three versions of gamification: competitive, cooperative, and
inter-team competitive gamification. We study these gamified conditions’
effects on users’ perceived enjoyment and usefulness of the system as
well as on their behaviors (system usage, crowdsourcing participation,
engagement with the gamification feature, and willingness to recommend
the crowdsourcing application). The results reveal that inter-team
competitions are most likely to lead to higher enjoyment and
crowdsourcing participation, as well as to a higher willingness to
recommending a system. Further, the findings indicate that designers
should consider cooperative instead of competitive approaches to
increase users’ willingness to recommend crowdsourcing systems. These
insights add relevant findings to the ongoing discourse on the roles of
different types of competitions in gamification designs and suggest that
crowdsourcing system designers and operators should implement
gamification with competing teams instead of typically used competitions
between individuals.