# Research on Factors Affecting Solvers' Participation Time in Online Crowdsourcing Contests
## 2 Literature Review  
From the existing research, there are many factors that influence the solvers' behavior in crowdsourcing contests. We divide these influencing factors into four categories, as follows: Task design, task description, task process, and environmental factors. The task rewards and task duration in the process of task design are important factors for many scholars. Task rewards are the motivation for solvers to gain economic value and compensate for their costs and energy. [PERSON] et al. [14] found that the increase in task rewards can stimulate solvers' motivations and improve their participation effort. [PERSON] et al. [15] divided the participation process in crowdsourcing contest into two phases, the registration phase and the solution submission phase. They found that the higher the task rewards, the higher the participation rate in the two phases. Based on the theory of expectation to model factors that influence the solvers' participation effort, [PERSON] et al. [16] found that task rewards and trust have a positive impact on participation efforts. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [17] have empirically found that task rewards are positively correlated with the number of registrations and submissions. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [18] found that monetary rewards, skills upgrading, job autonomy, enjoyment, and trust will positively affect solvers' participation in crowdsourcing contest. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [4] analyzed the relationship between participation and incentives, pointing out that task rewards are not the only factor affecting participation, and that the impact of the task duration should also be considered. [PERSON] et al. [7] found that higher task rewards, longer task durations, and shorter task descriptions would attract more solvers. Task descriptions are the specific requirements of seekers for solvers' solutions. The quality of the task description directly affects the certainty of a task to be solved, thus affecting the solvers' participation behavior. [PERSON] et al. [7] studied online crowdsourcing contests through large-scale data and found that shorter task descriptions would attract more solutions, especially for tasks based on simple ideas. [PERSON] et al. [19] implemented two sets of experimental studies to conclude that task rewards are the factors that motivate solvers to produce higher quality solutions and that clear and simple task descriptions can help improve crowdsourcing performance. By studying the impact of task description length and task duration on the success of the project in the software crowdsourcing contest, [PERSON] et al. [20] found that the longer the task description and the longer the task duration of the project, the more likely it is to succeed. In addition, [PERSON] et al. [21] studied the impact of project descriptions of crowdfunding in a crowdfunding platform, which is similar to crowdsourcing. They found that the length and the readability of the description significantly affected the probability of crowdfunding success. [PERSON] et al. [22] studied the impact of problem specification of task description on the outcome of the competition and found that if more conceptual objectives are disclosed in the problem specification, the number of solvers in the competition decreases, but the workload of each solver does not change. If more implementation guidelines disclosed in the problem specification, each solver's workload increases, but the number of solvers in the game does not change. According to the uncertainty reduction theory, [PERSON] et al. [23] believe that a clear and concise problem description can increase the confidence of potential solvers and thus increase their willingness to participate. Task communication during the task process will also affect the solvers' participation. [PERSON] et al. [24] found that a larger number of feedbacks and faster feedback speeds from enterprises in the crowdsourcing process can significantly increase the number of creative submissions.