What can crowdsourcing do for decision support ?

Abstract

Crowdsourcing can be viewed as a method of distributing work to a large number of workers (the crowd) both inside and outside of an organization, for the purpose of improving decision making, completing cumbersome tasks, or co-creation of designs and other projects. Of the various applications of crowdsourcing, the one investigated in this paper is to support various phases of managerial decision-making and problem solving. To examine the research issues related to such support, we created a framework based on four major components of crowdsourcing: the task that is outsourced, the crowd which carries out the task, the crowdsourcing process, and the outcome evaluation. Each component is examined from the managerial, behavioral, and information technology aspects. This framework enables us to organize existing literature and identify key research issues. Suggested topics for future research are described. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.