Innovation Contests, Open Innovation, and Multiagent Problem Solving

In an innovation contest, a firm (the seeker) facing an innovation-related problem (e.g., a technical R&D problem) posts this problem to a population of independent agents (the solvers) and then provides an award to the agent that generated the best solution. In this paper, we analyze the interaction between a seeker and a set of solvers. Prior research in economics suggests that having many solvers work on an innovation problem will lead to...