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PublicationRags to Riches - How signaling behaviour causes a power shift in crowdsourcing marketsCrowdsourcing has emerged as new form of digital work organization. This novel socio-technical ar-rangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature. In this paper, we focus on the crowdworkers – a perspective that has been largely neglected by crowdsourcing research. We re-port results from crowdworker-interviews on two different platforms. Our research shows that quality signals of crowdworkers increase the bargaining power towards their principals, i.e. the crowdsourcers. As a result, the crowdworkers can reach a turning point of critical bargaining power at which the distribution of power shifts in their favor. We contribute to the literature by unraveling signaling behavior as mechanism influencing bargaining power and thus success in crowdsourcing. Beyond, we develop a theoretical model that indicates a shift in bargaining power over time and im-proves our understanding of crowdsourcing as novel way of organizing digital work. For practice, our results provide guidelines for crowdworkers how to improve their position in bargaining in relation to the crowdsourcer.
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PublicationWhen is Crowdsourcing Advantageous? The Case of Crowdsourced Software Testing(Boğaziçi University, 2016)Crowdsourcing describes a novel mode of value creation in which organizations broadcast tasks that have been previously performed in-house to a large magnitude of Internet users that perform these tasks. Although the concept has gained maturity and has proven to be an alternative way of problem-solving, an organizational cost-benefit perspective has largely been neglected by existing research. More specifically, it remains unclear when crowdsourcing is advantageous in comparison to alternative governance structures such as in-house production. Drawing on crowdsourcing literature and transaction action cost theory, we present two case studies from the domain of crowdsourced software testing. We systematically analyze two organizations that applied crowdtesting to test a mobile application. As both organizations tested the application via crowdtesting and their traditional in-house testing, we are able to relate the effectiveness of crowdtesting and the associated costs to the effectiveness and costs of in-house testing. We find that crowdtesting is comparable in terms of testing quality and costs, but provides large advantages in terms of speed, heterogeneity of testers and user feedback as added value. We contribute to the crowdsourcing literature by providing first empirical evidence about the instances in which crowdsourcing is an advantageous way of problem solving.
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PublicationThe Rise of Crowd Aggregators - How Individual Workers Restructure Their Own Crowd( 2017-02-12)
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PublicationHow to Systematically Conduct Crowdsourced Software Testing? Insights from an Action Research ProjectNowadays, traditional testing approaches become less feasible – both economically and practicably - for several reasons, such as an increasingly dynamic environment, shorter product lifecycles, cost pressure, as well as a fast growing and increasingly segmented hardware market. With the surge towards new modes of value creation, crowdsourced software testing (CST) seems to be a promising solution to effectively solve these problems and was already applied in various software testing contexts. However, literature so far mostly neglected the perspective of an organization intending to crowdsource tasks. In this study, we present an ongoing action research project with a consortium of six companies and present a preliminary model for crowdsourced software testing in organizations. The model unfolds necessary activities, process changes, and the accompanied roles for crowdsourced software testing to enable organizations to systematically conduct such initiatives and illustrates how test departments can use crowdsourcing as a new tool in their department.
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PublicationTowards Successful Crowdsourcing Projects: Evaluating the Implementation of Governance Mechanisms(Association for Information Systems, 2015-12-13)
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PublicationCrowdsourcing und Crowd Work - Neue Formen digitaler Arbeit(Verlag aw&I Wissenschaft und Praxis, 2015)