The Future of Crowd Work
16th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Coooperative Work (CSCW 2013), Forthcoming
17 Pages Posted: 19 Dec 2012
Date Written: December 18, 2012
Abstract
Paid crowd work offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework. Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate? This paper frames the major challenges that stand in the way of this goal. Drawing on theory from organizational behavior and distributed computing, as well as direct feedback from workers, we outline a framework that will enable crowd work that is complex, collaborative, and sustainable. The framework lays out research challenges in twelve major areas: workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, real-time response, synchronous collaboration, quality control, crowds guiding AIs, AIs guiding crowds, platforms, job design, reputation, and motivation.
Keywords: Crowdsourcing, crowd work, organization design, research vision
JEL Classification: O31, J40, J24, D20
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Running Experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk
By Gabriele Paolacci, Jesse Chandler, ...
-
The Online Laboratory: Conducting Experiments in a Real Labor Market
By John J. Horton, David G. Rand, ...
-
The Online Laboratory: Conducting Experiments in a Real Labor Market
By John J. Horton, David G. Rand, ...
-
Conducting Behavioral Research on Amazon's Mechanical Turk
By Winter Mason and Siddharth Suri
-
The Labor Economics of Paid Crowdsourcing
By John J. Horton and Lydia B. Chilton
-
On the Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment: New Experimental Evidence
By Gary Charness, Edi Karni, ...
-
Economic Games on the Internet: The Effect of $1 Stakes
By Ofra Amir, David G. Rand, ...