Studying the Influence of Requesters in Posted-price Crowdsourcing

Crowd-powered systems have recently emerged as useful models for solving complex tasks online by combining machine intelligence with crowd intelligence. These models are mainly of two types collaborative and competitive. Studying the behavior of the participating crowd workers and requester experiences might yield useful insights about both these models. Analyzing the behaviors of crowd workers has been in major focus for the past several years, whereas requester behaviors have rarely been studied. In this paper, we study the activity of requesters in Flightfox, a competitive crowdsourcing environment, that works on posted-price mechanism to gain new insights about the model. We analyze the task completion data from Flightfox to investigate the patterns of interest and activity of the requesters. It came into view that requesters have an important role in the crowd-powered systems. Again, the behavioral psychology of the requesters appear to inspire the sustainability of the studied model. The global pattern of the requester activities is found to reflect scale-free behavior. Overall, we highlighted some interesting influential characteristics of the requesters in crowdsourcing platforms that were hitherto unknown.