We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Discrimination in Online Platforms Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 February 2024
SECTION I. DEFINING LABOR PLATFORMS AND WORKER EVALUATION SYSTEMS
TYPES OF ONLINE LABOR PLATFORMS
Online labor platforms are primarily focused on the service sector. The specialized literature generally labels them under two distinct categories: professional crowdsourcing platforms and on-demand work platforms. On the one hand, both models use the internet to create a marketplace where workers and hiring entities can meet; on the other hand, they provide different types of services and working methods.
Journalist JeffHowe fi rst used the word “crowdsourcing” in 2006 to describe “the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent, usually an employee, and outsourcing it to an undefi ned generally large group of people in the form of an open call.” In other words, crowdsourcing platforms allow third-party companies to fragment a particular chore and assign it to a community of crowd workers. The content of crowd tasks range from creative to repetitive work, including the creation of marketing campaigns, coding, proofreading academic pieces, designing, and human intelligence tasks (HITs), such as data entry. Considering the nature of the crowd tasks, crowdsourcing platforms may have a geographic global dimension in which workers may provide their work remotely. Moreover, the payment system may be performed according to the output or based on hours worked.
Amazon Mechanical Turk and Clickworker are two prominent examples of crowdsourcing platforms. Both platforms facilitate outsourcing work to a distributed workforce that can perform tasks virtually. They typically offer micro-task jobs related to cleaning online directories, testing new software, categorizing items, transcribing audio documents, editing texts, managing surveys, detecting images with obscene content, or detecting images in general, such as “identifying the red apple in this image of a fruit basket.” The numbers are not negligible. The platform Clickworker is based in the United States and Germany, but its workforce – more than 1.8 million individuals – is located in 136 countries. Clickworker highlights its importance in offering micro-tasks to hundreds of thousands of workers to help optimize AI-based searches, for instance.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
