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The Price of the Priceless: Understanding Estimated Costs of Work in Friendsourcing

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Friendsourcing, or outsourcing tasks to one's online and offline friends, is increasingly common and versatile. As regular crowdsourcing, friendsourcing requesters needs to incentivize potential workers (i.e., friends) to actually engage and complete the requested tasks. However, it is unclear how to effectively motivate friendsourcing workers and what incentives, which may include both social and monetary ones, are considered feasible in friendsourcing, especially by taking social relations between requesters and workers as part of the calculation. In an exploratory study, we asked participants to report their estimations of feasible payment as a requester, and reward as a worker in friendsourcing. We compare the estimated costs of friendsourcing to regular crowdsourcing, and find that there exists a gap between requesters' and workers' expected costs. Individuals would like to pay more as a requester, and expect to receive less as a worker in friendsourcing. Consideration of social transaction and relationship maintenance is involved. We discuss the implications for designing friendsourcing systems.

References

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  1. The Price of the Priceless: Understanding Estimated Costs of Work in Friendsourcing

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    2546 pages
    ISBN:9781450331463
    DOI:10.1145/2702613
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. friendsourcing
    2. social networks
    3. social transaction

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    CHI '15
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    CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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    CHI EA '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,520 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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