Now showing 1 - 10 of 17
  • Publication
    How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively
    (Sciendo, 2020) ;
    Zogaj, Shkodran
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    Bretschneider, Ulrich
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    Crowdsourced tasks are very diverse – and so are platform types. They fall into four categories, each demanding different governance mechanisms. The main goal of microtasking crowdsourcing platforms is the scalable and time-efficient batch processing of highly repetitive tasks. Crowdsourcing platforms for information pooling aggregate contributions such as votes, opinions, assessments and forecasts through approaches such as averaging, summation, or visualization. Broadcast search platforms collect contributions to solve tasks in order to gain alternative insights and solutions from people outside the organization, and are particularly suited for solving challenging technical, analytical, scientific, or creative problems. Open collaboration platforms invite contributors to team up to jointly solve complex problems in cases where solutions require the integration of distributed knowledge and the skills of many contributors. Companies establishing crowdsourcing platforms of any type should continuously monitor and adjust their governance mechanisms. Quality and quantity of contributions, project runtime, or the effort for conducting the crowdsourcing project may be good starting points.
  • Publication
    The Nature of Crowd Work and its Effects on Individuals’ Work Perception
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020-03-03)
    Durward, David
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    Crowd work reflects a new form of gainful employment on the Internet. We study how the nature of the tasks being performed and financial compensation jointly shape work perceptions of crowdworkers in order to better understand the changing modes and patterns of digital work. Surveying individuals on 23 German crowd working platforms, this work is the first to add a multi-platform perspective on perceived working conditions in crowd work. We show that crowd workers need rather high levels of financial compensation before task characteristics become relevant for shaping favorable perceptions of working conditions. We explain these results by considering financial compensation as an informational cue indicating the appreciation of working effort that is internalized by well-paid crowd workers. Resulting boundary conditions for task design are discussed. These results help us understand when and under what conditions crowd work can be regarded as a fulfilling type of employment in highly developed countries.
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    Scopus© Citations 58
  • Publication
    Why Incorporating a Platform-Intermediary can Increase Crowdsourcees’ Engagement
    While the crowdsourcer’s job is to encourage valuable contributions and sustained commitment in a cost-effective manner, it seems as if the primary attention of management and research is still centered on the evaluation of contributions rather than the crowd. As many crowdsourcers lack the resources to successfully execute such projects, crowdsourcing intermediaries play an increasingly important role. First studies dealt with internal management challenges of incorporating an intermediary. However, the issue of how intermediaries influence crowdsourcees’ psychological and behavioral responses, further referred to as engagement, has not been addressed yet. Consequently, two leading research questions guide this paper: (1) How can the engagement process of crowdsourcees be conceptualized? (2) How and why do crowdsourcing intermediaries impact crowdsourcees’ engagement? This study extends existing knowledge by offering IS-researchers a process perspective on engagement and exploring the underlying mechanisms and IT-enabled stimuli that foster value-creation in a mediated and non-mediated setting. A theoretical process model is first conceptualized and then explored with insights from two common cases in the growing field of crowd testing. By triangulating platform and interview data, initial propositions concerning the role of specific stimuli and the intermediary within the engagement process are derived. It is proposed that crowdsourcing enterprises, incorporating intermediaries, have the potential to generate a desired engagement state when perceived stimuli under their control belong to the so-called group of “game changers” and “value adders”, while the intermediary controls mainly “risk factors” for absorbing negative experiences. Apart from the theoretical relevance of studying mediated engagement processes and explaining voluntary use and participation in a socio-technical system, findings support decisions on how to effectively incorporate platform intermediaries.
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  • Publication
    How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively?
    (Sage Publishing, 2018-02-01) ;
    Zogaj, Shkodran
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    Bretschneider, Ulrich
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    To profit from crowdsourcing, organizations can engage in four different approaches: microtasking, information pooling, broadcast search, and open collaboration. This article presents 21 governance mechanisms that can help organizations manage their crowdsourcing platforms. It investigates the effectiveness of these governance mechanisms in 19 case studies and recommends specific configurations of these mechanisms for each of the four crowdsourcing approaches. Also, it offers guidance to organizations that host a crowdsourcing platform by providing recommendations for implementing governance mechanisms into their platforms and building up governance capabilities for crowdsourcing.
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    Scopus© Citations 94
  • Publication
    Crowd Work
    (Springer Gabler, 2016)
    Durward, David
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    Scopus© Citations 76
  • Publication
    Crowdsourcing: How to Benefit from (Too) Many Great Ideas
    (Kelley School of Business, 2013-12) ; ;
    Krcmar, Helmut
    This article focuses on how companies can cope with the enormous volume and variety of data (big data) that is acquired on crowdsourcing platforms from the worldwide community of Internet users. We identify the challenges of implementing crowdsourcing platforms and show how CIOs and other organizational leaders can build the absorptive capacity necessary to extract business value from crowdsourced data.
  • Publication
    Is There PAPA in Crowd Work? : A Literature Review on Ethical Dimensions in Crowdsourcing
    (IEEE, 2016-07-18)
    Durward, David
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    The phenomenon of crowdsourcing has emerged as a new pattern of digitally mediated collaboration. This novel socio-technical arrangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature and takes place in information systems (IS) in which humans face many threats to their dignity. For this reason, the importance of ethical issues within this new form of employment arises. Hence, in this paper we focus on the ethical issues in crowd work – a perspective that has been largely neglected by current crowdsourcing research. We analyze recent crowdsourcing literature and extract ethical issues by following the PAPA (privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility of information) concept, a well-established approach in IS. The review focuses on the individual perspective of crowdworkers, which addresses their working conditions and benefits. Although, the literature review exhibits that there are PAPA dimensions in crowdsourcing, only few focus on the crowdworkers as individuals. Our findings contribute to further research in crowdsourcing by introducing an ethical framework and give practical insight into how to design sustainable and ethical crowd work.
    Scopus© Citations 16
  • Publication
    An Empirical Taxonomy of Crowdsourcing Intermediaries
    (Academy of Management, 2016) ;
    Durward, David
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    Zogaj, Shkodran
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    Crowdsourcing has drawn much attention from researchers in the past. Thus, there are already attempts to conceptualize and classify the phenomenon. All of the existing work has their merits; however they lack an overviewing perspective or meta-characteristic. They are conceptual in nature, lack theoretical grounding, and – most importantly – are not empirically validated. Hence, we develop an empirical taxonomy of crowdsourcing intermediaries embedded in the theory of two-sided markets. Collecting data from 100 intermediaries and performing cluster analysis, we identify five archetypes of crowdsourcing intermediaries: Micro-tasking, knowledge work, design competition, testing and validation as well as innovation. The taxonomy establishes a systematic and comprehensive overview of crowdsourcing intermediaries and thereby provides a better understanding of the basic types of crowdsourcing and its core functions. For practice, we provide decision support for crowdsourcers as well as crowdsourcees on which platform to be active on.
  • Publication
    When is Crowdsourcing Advantageous? The Case of Crowdsourced Software Testing
    (Boğaziçi University, 2016) ;
    Knop, Nicolas
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    Müller-Bloch, Christoph
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    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.
  • Publication
    Crowdsourcing in Software Development: A State-of-the-Art Analysis
    As software development cycles become shorter and shorter, while software complexity in-creases and IT budgets stagnate, many companies are looking for new ways of acquiring and sourcing knowledge outside their boundaries. One promising solution to aggregate know-how and manage large distributed teams in software development is crowdsourcing. This paper analyzes the existing body of knowledge regarding crowdsourcing in software development. As a result, we propose a fundamental framework with five dimensions to structure the existing insights of crowdsourcing in the context of software development and to derive a research agenda to guide further research.