The Economic Anatomy of Paid Crowdsourcing Platforms

The discovery and dissemination of crowdsourcing have led to the emergence of platforms that offer the infrastructure for implementing crowdsourcing projects on a commercial basis. In this study, we investigate the economic structures of such paid crowdsourcing platforms. We develop an integrated Crowdsourcing Platform Economic Design framework based on existing studies on crowdsourcing and platform design. The framework incorporates a wide range of mechanisms available for the economic structure of paid crowdsourcing platforms grouped into three areas: Search and Matching, Pricing and Rewarding, and Control and Assembling. We further use the resulting framework to systematically compare and classify the economic structures of 45 paid crowdsourcing platforms. As a result, we provide a taxonomy of paid crowdsourcing platforms based on the economic mechanisms and their usage dependencies. The presented study of paid crowdsourcing platforms complements and extends the existing literature on crowdsourcing and platform economy; it also creates an appropriate basis for further research in these directions.