Experiments on Crowdsourcing Policy Assessment

• Main Authors: Prpić, John, TAEIHAGH, Araz, Melton, James
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: Crowdsourcing; Crowdsourcing Experiment; Policy Assessment; Climate Change; Expert Policy Assessment; Non-Expert Policy Assessment; Virtual Labor Markets; Crowds; Policy Measures; Experimental Methods; Climate Change Adaptation; Political Science; Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/1854; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3111/viewcontent/Araz_2014_ExperimentsCrowdsourcingPolicyAssessment.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Can Crowds serve as useful allies in policy design? How do non-expert Crowds perform relative to experts in the assessment of policy measures? Does the geographic location of non-expert Crowds, with relevance to the policy context, alter the performance of non-experts Crowds in the assessment of policy measures? In this work, we investigate these questions by undertaking experiments designed to replicate expert policy assessments with non-expert Crowds recruited from Virtual Labor Markets. We use a set of ninety-six climate change adaptation policy measures previously evaluated by experts in the Netherlands as our control condition to conduct experiments using two discrete sets of non-expert Crowds recruited from Virtual Labor Markets. We vary the composition of our non-expert Crowds along two conditions: participants recruited from a geographical location directly relevant to the policy context and participants recruited at-large. We discuss our research methods in detail and provide the findings of our experiments.