Who's more creative, experts or the crowd?

Prior literature has indicated a remarkable change in the role of the crowd. Gradually, the crowd, in the process of interacting with firms, is no longer limited to providing demand information alone; rather, the crowd sometimes start participating either partially or fully in product innovation. Such change is based on an underlying assumption that the crowd (or customers) would provide creative thinking and thus help firms with product innovation. However, since this assumption has not been formally tested, this paper explores the difference between experts and the crowd in terms of generating creative ideas for products. By launching two experiments on Amazon‟s Mechanical Turk platform and analyzing the resulting data, I found that a difference does exist and is significantly moderated by the extent of information asymmetry embedded across different products.