David Durward

An empirical taxonomy of crowdsourcing intermediaries

Due to the recent popularity of crowdfunding, a broad magnitude of crowdfunding intermediaries has emerged, while research on crowdfunding intermediaries has been largely neglected. As a consequence, existing classifications of crowdfunding intermediaries are conceptual, lack theoretical grounding, and are not empirically validated. Thus, we develop an empirical taxonomy of crowdfunding intermediaries, which is grounded in the theories of two-sided markets and financial intermediation. Integrating these theories, we develop a crowdfunding intermediation model that we use as foundation for performing cluster analysis with data of 127 intermediaries. We identify three generic archetypes of crowdfunding intermediaries, which differ in their value proposition: Hedonism, Altruism, and For Profit. Our crowdfunding intermediation model and our empirical taxonomy improve our understanding of crowdfunding by showing how crowdfunding intermediaries manage financial intermediation and digitally transform exchange relations between capital-giving and seeking agents in two-sided online markets. For practice, our research may help characterize the crowdfunding industry.

Is There PAPA in Crowd Work?: A Literature Review on Ethical Dimensions in Crowdsourcing

The phenomenon of crowdsourcing has emerged as a new pattern of digitally mediated collaboration. This novel socio-technical arrangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature, takes place in information systems (IS) in which humans face many threats to their dignity. For this reason, the importance of ethical issues within this new form of employment arises. Hence, in this paper we focus on the ethical issues in crowd work – a perspective that has been largely neglected by current crowdsourcing research. We analyze recent crowdsourcing literature, extract ethical issues by following the PAPA (privacy, accuracy, property, accessibility of information) concept, a well-established approach in IS. The review focuses on the individual perspective of crowdworkers, which addresses their working conditions, benefits. Although, the literature review exhibits that there are PAPA dimensions in crowdsourcing, only few focus on the crowdworkers as individuals. Our findings contribute to further research in crowdsourcing by introducing an ethical framework, give practical insight into how to design sustainable, ethical crowd work.