6533b85afe1ef96bd12b9174

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Intellectual property management between buyer-supplier in the crowdsourcing context

subject

description

In this paper we investigate the antecedents of buyers’ decisions related to the management of the IPR generated by the suppliers in crowdsourcing contests. Leveraging on Property Rights Theory and interview data, we examine how contest’ attributes affect two buyers’ decisions about (1) whether to define an IPR arrangement ex-ante or negotiating it ex-post with the winning supplier; (2) the choice between strong or weak ownership levels of the IPR arrangement. To test the developed hypotheses, we build a dataset of 819 contests broadcasted on InnoCentive (from 2010 to 2016). Our findings contribute to both the operations management and the crowdsourcing literatures.