What Do We Know About Task Characteristics of Crowdsourcing?

Digitalization and the Internet changed our life. Many phenomena are responsible for this change. A relatively new one is crowdsourcing. Companies such as Amazon or Procter and Gambles use crowdsourcing successfully. The change will continue and we need to fully understand this subject to use the potential offered by this new phenomenon. This literature review summarizes and structures the crowdsourcing literature with focusing on the crowdsourcability of tasks. We analyzed the outsourcing literature to build a framework and adopted 7 perspectives, which were used to describe the outsourcability of tasks. The framework helps us to structure and analyze the crowdsourcing literature with focusing on the crowdsourcability of tasks. We found relevant literature regarding every perspective, but great research gaps were shown concerning these perspectives, leading to the assumption that the task characteristics of crowdsourcing are not sufficiently explored by the state-of-the-art literature. More research is needed to fully understand and use the potential of crowdsourcing.