English

Modeling crowdsourcing as collective problem solving

Physics and Society 2016-04-04 v5 Social and Information Networks Popular Physics

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a process of accumulating the ideas, thoughts or information from many independent participants, with aim to find the best solution for a given challenge. Modern information technologies allow for massive number of subjects to be involved in a more or less spontaneous way. Still, the full potentials of crowdsourcing are yet to be reached. We introduce a modeling framework through which we study the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in relation to the level of collectivism in facing the problem. Our findings reveal an intricate relationship between the number of participants and the difficulty of the problem, indicating the optimal size of the crowdsourced group. We discuss our results in the context of modern utilization of crowdsourcing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.09155,
  title  = {Modeling crowdsourcing as collective problem solving},
  author = {Andrea Guazzini and Daniele Vilone and Camillo Donati and Annalisa Nardi and Zoran Levnajic},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.09155},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

19 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:03:09.119Z