Let’s Do This! Or Not? Baruch Professor Studies Effects of Online Competitions

February 5, 2026

Maria Halbinger, an associate professor in the Lawrence N. Field Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, has watched in recent years as digital competitions across various platforms have become highly popular tools for platform managers to generate new content, attract users to the platform, and generally keep things interesting.

Meanwhile, the academic in her has wondered, do they actually work?

That was the inspiration for “Challenge Accepted: The Effects of Contest Participation on a User-Generated Content Community,” which was recently published in the journal Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Halbinger and her co-authors used Thingiverse, a three-dimensional (3D) printing platform, to examine the tensions between collaboration and competition when user-generated communities introduce challenges.

“There’s a lot of research on user communities where people share their designs and innovations and the culture is very collaborative,” Halbinger says. “There’s also operations management research that studies contest design.”

Halbinger et al. examined over 10 years of Thingiverse activity, including both the regular platform community activity and 29 challenges run on the platform. They gathered empirical data (time-stamped information on contest submissions, number of designs saved in collections, number of likes received, etc.) to compare engagement and contribution levels after each challenge between those who participated and those who didn’t.

The study’s authors found three relevant outcomes. First, contests increase community reaction, i.e., contest submissions are more often liked, collected, or commented on by other users. The authors explain this by a “spotlight effect” (contest designs are more prominently featured on the platform than regular submissions) but also by contestants’ increasing efforts, i.e. submitting to a contest makes users work harder. However, while participation in a contest increases the odds for participants to submit again in the future to a contest by over 22 percent. the likelihood of contestants’ contributing to the general community after participating in a contest declined by a much larger 34 percent. This is presumably because submitting to a contest provides opportunities for learning and more attention from other users. This type of recognition is an important motivator in platform communities, as users enjoy and feel incentivized by the attention they receive, so they keep entering more contests.

But if users are spending their time and effort honing creative 3D model designs for the Mars Base Challenge (Thingiverse’s challenge collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) or Halloween-themed ornaments, they’ll have less time and attention for collaboration and sharing in the general community.

“Overall, the amount of content goes down once challenges are introduced,” Halbinger says. Because attention represents one of the scarcest resources on digital platforms and users make economic choices, “contests are more a substitution and not an expansion of creative effort.”

Finally and notably, however, the authors also found that participating in a contest, users develop and keep on developing more exploratory, innovative designs, suggesting that contests redirect participants’ attention to venture into new, unfamiliar domains when problem-solving. This finding is of particular interest if the aim is to trigger novel and original content on a platform.

While admitting the limits of examining only one user-generated content community (Thingiverse), Halbinger says her research provides detailed guidance for managers interested in applying communal and competitive initiatives on UGC platforms. If managers aim to increase overall content quantity, introducing contests to an existing community may be detrimental, as they seem to primarily trigger contest-related UGC and not “regular community” content. If they aim for content diversity instead, contests are a vehicle to promote contestants’ exploratory behavior.

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