Understanding Workers, Developing Effective Tasks, and Enhancing Marketplace Dynamics: A Study of a Large Crowdsourcing Marketplace

We conduct an experimental analysis of a dataset comprising over 27 million microtasks performed by over 70,000 workers issued to a large crowdsourcing marketplace between 2012-2016. Using this data—never before analyzed in an academic context—we shed light on three crucial aspects of crowdsourcing: (1) Task design — helping requesters understand what constitutes an effective task, and how to go about designing one; (2) Marketplace dynamics — helping marketplace administrators and designers understand the interaction between tasks and workers, and the corresponding marketplace load; and (3) Worker behavior — understanding worker attention spans, lifetimes, and general behavior, for the improvement of the crowdsourcing ecosystem as a whole.