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.