Crowdworking: working with or against the crowd?

Abstract

Abstract Our current labour market is affected by massive changes like digitalization, automation and globalization, which gives rise to completely new forms of generating income. One such innovative idea is crowdworking, where many people (a so-called crowd) work on individual tasks for a firm in a way similar to a self-employed freelancer. This form of occupation is a recent development but gains acceptance, esteem and relevance quite rapidly. The risk potential for wage dumping and (self-) exploitation is still unknown. A crucial, but often neglected fact about crowdworking is that it exists in many variants which have completely different properties. We investigate how much these distinct versions of crowdworking differ by using an agent-based computer simulation. Wages, job security, workforce composition and other relevant indicators are calculated by simulating the micro scale to gain aggregated information on the macro-scale. We find that there is a significant difference between the versions of crowdworking. Our main finding is that especially variants where the crowdworkers are able to set their own wages are susceptible to wage dumping. Simulations suggest that this phenomenon is independent of the specifics of the labour market but rather a fundamental property of those variants of crowdworking.