Experiments on Crowdsourcing Policy Assessment
Prpić, J., Taeihagh, A., & Melton, J. (2014). Experiments on Crowdsourcing Policy Assessment. Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford - IPP 2014 - Crowdsourcing for Politics and Policy.
16 Pages Posted: 6 May 2014 Last revised: 17 Dec 2015
Date Written: May 5, 2014
Abstract
Can Crowds serve as useful allies in policy design? How do non-expert Crowds perform relative to experts in the assessment of policy measures? Does the geographic location of non-expert Crowds, with relevance to the policy context, alter the performance of non-experts Crowds in the assessment of policy measures? In this work, we investigate these questions by undertaking experiments designed to replicate expert policy assessments with non-expert Crowds recruited from Virtual Labor Markets. We use a set of ninety-six climate change adaptation policy measures previously evaluated by experts in the Netherlands as our control condition to conduct experiments using two discrete sets of non-expert Crowds recruited from Virtual Labor Markets. We vary the composition of our non-expert Crowds along two conditions: participants recruited from a geographical location directly relevant to the policy context and participants recruited at-large. We discuss our research methods in detail and provide the findings of our experiments.
Keywords: Crowdsourcing, Crowdsourcing Experiment, Policy Assessment, Climate Change, Expert Policy Assessment, Non-Expert Policy Assessment, Virtual Labor Markets, Crowds, Policy Measures, Experimental Methods, Climate Change Adaptation
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