Now showing 1 - 10 of 16
  • Publication
    The Rise of Crowd Aggregators - How Individual Workers Restructure Their Own Crowd
    Crowd work has emerged as a new form of digital gainful employment whose nature is still a black box. In this paper, we focus on the crowd workers – a perspective that has been largely neglected by research. We report results from crowd worker interviews on two different platforms. Our findings illustrate that crowd aggregators as new players restructure the nature of crowd work sustainably with different effects on the behavior as well as the existing relationships of crowd workers. We contribute to prior research by developing a theoretical framework based on value chain and work aggregation theories which are applicable in this new form of digital labor. For practice, our results provide initial insights that need to be taken into account as part of the ongoing discussion on fair and decent conditions in crowd work.
  • Publication
    Blueprinting Crowdfunding - Designing a Crowdfunding Service Configuration Framework
    Crowdfunding gained momentum over the last few years. In contrast to traditional forms of funding, the service provision of crowdfunding platforms is performed within service systems. These comprise a complex combination of IT and non-IT services, different stakeholders, and diverging contexts and purposes. The design and operation of such service systems represents a tough challenge. Therefore, we developed a crowdfunding service configuration framework in the form of a morphological box and derived three dominant design patterns by following a design science approach. Therefore, we followed three iterations, which comprise in total twelve expert interviews, three case studies and the analysis of 161 crowdfunding platforms. The configuration framework extends research on crowdfunding and service science by providing insights in how to support the systematic design of crowdfunding service systems, reducing their complexity, and giving a comprehensive overview over their building blocks.
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  • Publication
    Managing Disruptive Innovation through Service Systems – The Case of Crowdlending in the Banking Industry
    (Association for Information Systems, 2016-12-11) ; ; ;
    Jakob, Thomas
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    The Internet has affected and partially radically changed the business models of traditional industries. Crowdfunding as a new concept of funding over the Internet by a large crowd has especially gained maturity. Crowdfunding offerings range from funding charitable projects or innovative gadgets to a funding alternative for start-ups or small businesses. Therefore, crowdfunding represents an innovative way to provide liquidity for illiquid markets. With regard to the banking crisis and the growing skepticism toward banks, crowdfunding is seen as a more transparent, democratic, and entertaining way of funding, which makes it highly attractive for banks. A senior innovation manager of The Bank of Switzerland (TBOS), one of Switzerland’s largest and most traditional banks, recognized the disruptive and beneficial potential of crowdlending. By facing strong resentments, he developed the idea of TBOS engaging in crowdlending by collaborating with a start-up by bundling competencies in a service system.
  • 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
    Rags to Riches - How signaling behaviour causes a power shift in crowdsourcing markets
    (Boğaziçi University, 2016)
    Durward, David
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    Crowdsourcing 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.
  • Publication
    How to Systematically Conduct Crowdsourced Software Testing? Insights from an Action Research Project
    (Association for Information Systems, 2016-12) ; ;
    Nowadays, 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.
  • 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.