Investigating Factors Influencing the Quality of Crowdsourced Work under Different Incentives: Some Empirical Results

Crowdsourcing is a new form of online labor, where the process of solving a problem is approached by soliciting contributions from a large group of people. In this paper, the authors attempt to investigate how different incentives affect the quality of work in such contexts, by completing the same task in three different environments: in a laboratory setting, on a social networking as well as on a crowdsourcing site. Analyzing the obtained results indicates that under different incentives, different factors contribute to the quality of work in crowdsourcing tasks. In general the research highlights that the identification of factors contributing positively to higher quality of work in crowdsourcing environments is a complex question, depending on the task at hand.