Macrotask Crowdsourcing: An Integrated Definition

The conceptual distinction between microtasks and macrotasks has been made relatively early on in the crowdsourcing literature. However, only recently a handful of research works has explored it explicitly. These works, for the most part, have focused on simply discussing macrotasks within the confines of their own work (e.g., in terms of creativity), without taking into account the multiple facets that working with such tasks involves. This has resulted in the term “macrotask” to be severely convoluted and largely meaning different things to different individuals. More importantly, it has resulted in disregarding macrotask crowdsourcing as a new labor model of its own right. To address this scholarly gap, in this paper we discuss macrotask crowdsourcing from a multitude of dimensions, namely the nature of the problem it can solve, the crowdworker skills it involves, and the work management structures it necessitates. In view of our analysis, we provide a first integrated definition of macrotask crowdsourcing.