Get your report a thumb-up: An empirical investigation on crowd testing

摘要

Crowd testing has been increasingly adopted as a marketing strategy for e-Retailers. However, scant academic research empirically addresses the performance of crowd testing from either the platform's or crowd testers' perspectives. This study aims to investigate the determinants of the usefulness of crowd testing reports in order to theoretically demonstrate the significance of crowd testing strategy, especially for new product promotion. We integrated text mining and regression to test the research model using the data extracted from a crowd testing website, Dealmoon.com. The analysis results show that the crowd testers' credibility and the testing report's information quality both play significant roles in the usefulness of crowd testing reports. Furthermore, the presence of peer testers' reports on the focal product moderates the effect of information quality on the report's usefulness. The research findings provide managerial implications for marketing practitioners to implement the crowd testing strategy effectively and for crowd testers to create useful testing reports.