When consumers own their work: Psychological ownership and consumer citizenship on crowdsourcing platforms

Abstract

Abstract The growth of crowdsourced platforms for consumer products has opened many interesting research questions on the impact of consumers participating in such crowdsourced work. In this paper, we focus on consumers' psychological ownership of the crowdsourced product and the role it plays in the relationship between consumer work and consumer citizenship. Further, drawing on social comparison theory, we show that consumers' perceived amount of work relative to others is a boundary condition for this explanation. Finally, we examine the theoretical contributions and managerial implications of our findings.