We explore how microwork platforms manage difficult tasks in paid crowdsourcing environments. We argue that as human computation becomes more prevalent, notably in the context of big data ecosystems, microwork platforms might have to evolve and to take a more managerial stance in order to provide the right incentives to online workers to handle difficult tasks. We illustrate this first through a name disambiguation experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), a well-known microwork platform, and second through direct analysis of the dynamics of task execution in a dataset of real microwork projects on AMT. We discuss the emergence of more specialised microwork platforms as an attempt to facilitate a better management of difficult tasks in the context of paid crowdsourcing.
At present, an more and more users are running Open Source software (OSS) on their systems. Major companies, like IBM, Oracle, or Sun Microsystems, have now started to make significant investments in developing open communities and creating a portfolio of systems incorporating OSS applications into their design. Meanwhile, an increasing number of firms are entering the market by offering OSS-based solutions to their customers, often supplying a mix of proprietary and open solutions through hybrid business models. In this context, economists and management scientists are now moving beyond the state of puzzlement that has driven much of the initial attention towards OSS. Located in the context of OSS2007 in order to foster close and fruitful interactions with scholars from various other disciplines, this workshop aims at contributing to the current evolutions of the economic and managerial research agendas about OSS, and thus to provide, first, an assessment of where we-economics and management scholars-are about OSS, and, second, an analysis of the renewed directions in which we should consider inquiring further in the near future, focusing notably on business, production, diffusion and innovation models. Toward a New Industrial Organization? OSS in Economic and Managerial Perspective 379 4. Innovation models: open innovation, factors favouring the emergence of OSS-like innovation regimes, policies dedicated to the software and to other sectors, open-source technology transfer, etc. 5. Standardization and platform strategies.
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