Understanding Workers, Developing Effective Tasks, and Enhancing Marketplace Dynamics: A Study of a Large Crowdsourcing Marketplace
This research addresses practical challenges for crowdsourcing marketplace stakeholders, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to new data.
The study analyzed a dataset of over 27 million microtasks from a large crowdsourcing marketplace to tackle problems in task design, marketplace dynamics, and worker behavior, providing insights for requesters, administrators, and the ecosystem.
We conduct an experimental analysis of a dataset comprising over 27 million microtasks performed by over 70,000 workers issued to a large crowdsourcing marketplace between 2012-2016. Using this data---never before analyzed in an academic context---we shed light on three crucial aspects of crowdsourcing: (1) Task design --- helping requesters understand what constitutes an effective task, and how to go about designing one; (2) Marketplace dynamics --- helping marketplace administrators and designers understand the interaction between tasks and workers, and the corresponding marketplace load; and (3) Worker behavior --- understanding worker attention spans, lifetimes, and general behavior, for the improvement of the crowdsourcing ecosystem as a whole.