Xie, H. orcid.org/0000-0001-9967-0626, Maddalena, E., Qarout, R. et al. (1 more author) (2023) The dark side of recruitment in crowdsourcing: ethics and transparency in micro-task marketplaces. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 32 (3). pp. 439-474. ISSN 0925-9724
Abstract
Micro-task crowdsourcing marketplaces like Figure Eight (F8) connect a large pool of workers to employers through a single online platform, by aggregating multiple crowdsourcing platforms (channels) under a unique system. This paper investigates the F8 channels’ demographic distribution and reward schemes by analysing more than 53k crowdsourcing tasks over four years, collecting survey data and scraping marketplace metadata. We reveal an heterogeneous per-channel demographic distribution, and an opaque channel commission scheme, that varies over time and is not communicated to the employer when launching a task: workers often will receive a smaller payment than expected by the employer. In addition, the impact of channel commission schemes on the relationship between requesters and crowdworkers is explored. These observations uncover important issues on ethics, reliability and transparency of crowdsourced experiment when using this kind of marketplaces, especially for academic research.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Behavioral and Social Science; Basic Behavioral and Social Science; Micro-task crowdsourcing; Human computation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Information School (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EUROPEAN COMMISSION - HORIZON 2020 732328 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 14 Sep 2023 12:05 |
Last Modified: | 14 Sep 2023 12:05 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10606-023-09464-9 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:203276 |