Potentials Of Blockchain In Crowdsourcing Platforms – An Outlook For Industrial Services

Abstract

Companies increasingly outsource services with the intention to disseminate risks and workload (problem) with other organizations. Reasons for that may be the lack of internal expertise, reduced execution costs, and network effects such as focus on the core business. Crowdsourcing is a way of disseminate the workload, utilizing external expertise and solving problems of a project with other, partly unknown, network participants. The goal of crowdsourcing is to separate responsibility and to balance the workload of employees (peer) or to make use of suitable external workforces coordinated by network mechanisms (platform). Crowdsourcing appears in an ambivalent way and needs regulating and participatory structures of employment. Due to the fact that a failure of a single entity may lead to the failure of the whole project, the mutually unknown participants have to rely on each other’s quality (performance). Cooperations are prone to information asymmetry and its corresponding uncertainty in terms of the partners’ behaviour which leads to the question of trust between the cooperating partners (principal and peer). This paper addresses the entities of a crowdsourcing system under the scope of the principal agent theory and its underlying behavioural assumptions. Five essential elements will be derived: principal, peer, problem, platform and performance (5 Ps). Based on this, the potentials of the blockchain technology will be explored by reflecting its functionalities to the derived elements and its contributions to ensure trust despite of information asymmetry in crowdsourcing platforms.