What motivates the crowd? A literature review on motivations for crowdsourcing

The main objective of the chapter is to provide an insight into the motivation mechanisms for the crowd to participate in crowdsourcing projects. For this to happen, the authors investigate the factors which have been suggested in the literature as influencing the motivation of the crowd and the task type in each study in the related literature and contrasted the motivation factors in various contexts. The systematic literature review method has been used for the purpose of this study. This involved a comprehensive search in five scientific databases which resulted in 575 papers. This initial pool of studies has been refined in various rounds and ended in identification of 37 studies which directly targeted the topic of motivation in crowdsourcing. The study introduces various categories of motivations and investigates the factors which have been utilized in each context. Finally, possible implications for practice and potential research gaps are discussed.