Exploring Intention to Return to a Crowdsourcing Platform Through Ethical Considerations

摘要

Organizations turn to crowdsourcing to perform tasks and solve problems, which they traditionally solved internally. Using the Web to work with an undefined workforce presents new challenges to organizations, and individuals choosing to work in crowdsourcing. This phenomenon has created new ethical issues. The aim of this study is to understand what ethical values are important to individuals participating in crowdsourcing, and whether these considerations affect the extent to which individuals intend to return to the crowdsourcing initiative. This research used a design science methodology to develop meta-requirements for a crowdsourcing system, which embeds ethical values. Using a crowdsourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, the experiment identified important ethical values, and compared two conditions -- one condition embedding ethical values, and one condition ignoring ethical values. The results showed by embedding ethical values into the crowdsourcing system, individuals are more likely to trust the organization, and their intention to return increases.