Breaking monotony with meaning: Motivation in crowdsourcing markets

Abstract

We conduct the first natural field experiment to explore the relationship between the "meaningfulness" of a task and worker effort. We employed about 2,500 workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor market, to label medical images. Although given an identical task, we experimentally manipulated how the task was framed. Subjects in the meaningful treatment were told that they were labeling tumor cells in order to assist medical researchers, subjects in the zero-context condition (the control group) were not told the purpose of the task, and, in stark contrast, subjects in the shredded treatment were not given context and were additionally told that their work would be discarded. We found that when a task was framed more meaningfully, workers were more likely to participate. We also found that the meaningful treatment increased the quantity of output (with an insignificant change in quality) while the shredded treatment decreased the quality of output (with no change in quantity). We believe these results will generalize to other short-term labor markets. Our study also discusses MTurk as an exciting platform for running natural field experiments in economics.

Tapping into the Collective Creativity of the Crowd: The Effectiveness of Key Incentives in Fostering Creative Crowdsourcing

“…The significance of intrinsic motivations on Mechanical Turk is echoed by the findings of similar studies [7], [15], [22], [23].…”

“…As crowdsourcing continues to gain prominence across a wide variety of fields, from product innovation [4] to social science research [5] to participatory art and culture [2], determining the incentive structures that drive online participation has been important goal of recent crowdsourcing scholarship [6], [7], [8]. Having a better understanding of the strategies that work best to facilitate the success of crowdsourcing campaigns is particularly important because, as Simula notes, crowdsourcing initiatives encounter significant challenges in attracting and maintaining quality participation, and for every successful campaign, there are many failed ones as well [9].…”

Marketing fortification of business through crowdsourcing and social responsibility: focus on South African SMEs

“…Unethical use of crowdsourcing may occur when some members benefit at the expense of others, without giving due acknowledgements to every participant (Busarovs, 2013). Other positive crowdsourcing elements are access to new ideas and solutions, deeper consumer engagement, opportunities for co-creation, optimization of tasks, and reduced costs (Mercuse, 2011), teamwork (Cattani et Consequently, crowdsourcing is a growing trend in the business world, which is particularly evident among multinational corporations (Chandler & Kapelner, 2013). However, there is little research to explain their worth in SMEs.…”

Practitioners' viewpoints on citizen science in water management: a case study in Dutch regional water resource management

“…Chandler and Kapelner, 2013;Raddick et al, 2010;Rogstadius et al, 2011), environmental monitoring (e.g. Hobbs and White, 2012;Roy et al, 2012) and meteorology (e.g.…”

“…they want to contribute to science or nature conservation (e.g. Chandler and Kapelner, 2013;Hobbs and White, 2012;Raddick et al, 2010;Rogstadius et al, 2011;Roy et al, 2012). Citizens are motivated to continue to contribute by (increasing) the extent of their involvement (Rotman et al, 2012;Roy et al, 2012), offering feedback concerning the work at three levels (individual contribution, group contribution and the use of data) and building a relationship based on trust between scientists and citizens (Rotman et al, 2012).…”