TOTW – Electronic Markets and Auctions: Fiverr vs. Amazon Mechanical Turk (group 80)

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For this week’s TOTW project we will take a closer look at  electronic markets and auctions. We decided to analyse Fiverr and Amazon Mechanical Turk, two e-service platforms. In this blog post, a summary of our video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQMS7XE_Iu4) and research will be provided. If you haven’t watched our video yet, here are the main takeaways.

 

Fiverr

Fiverr is an online marketplace found in 2009 by Shai Wininger and Micha Kaufman, coined as “eBay for the service economy” by the latter. The website facilitates the supply and demand of any kind of micro-service, or ‘Gig’. A Gig can be a professional service such as market research or web design, but can also be as simple as a video of a person singing you a birthday song. Users are able to find freelancers who provide any skill, talent or resource in exchange for a fee starting at $5. Any upgrades in terms of service level or volume allows suppliers to exceed this base price if desired (Wauters, 2012). Over the past five years, 4.2 million Gigs were created (Fiver, 2016).

 

SWOT – Fiverr

Strengths	Weaknesses
Created a new category within E-commerce called micro services. Created strong barriers to market entry and have experienced business units	High degree of automation. Limited control for sellers which distorts  the peer-to-peer rating review system Loss of control in decision making process due to extensive VC funding
Opportunities	Threats
A steady increase in demand due to a growing E-commerce market. Increased internet access in developing countries.	Increased competition is likely to lower prices and decrease  profitability Imbalance ratio between buyers and sellers

 

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an online crowdsourcing market place, launched in 2005 under Amazon Web Services. The website facilitates ‘workers’ and ‘requesters’ of HITs, short for Human Intelligence Tasks. These tasks should be (practically) unable to be performed by computers, and can hence only be outsourced to humans. Examples of this are categorizing images, cleaning databases and filling out surveys. Workers are free to browse and accept any type of job, in return for a pre-set fee by the requester upon successful completion (Amazon MTurk, 2016). As a result, many of the tasks available are relatively simple and repetitive and typically earn workers only several cents to complete them. Over 500,000 workers are using AMT in 190 countries (Williamson, 2014).

 

SWOT – AMT

Strengths	Weaknesses
Tasks are in theory only limited to the boundaries of our imagination Provides a good platform to assign-piece work at very low costs	Workers  might provide opinions based on what client wants to hear, abiding to social desirability bias. Workers may add random feedback or skip steps
Opportunities	Threats
Provides a venue for generating big data easily and testing early stage concepts quickly & inexpensively	Rise of Artificial Intelligence. Tasks might be automated and replaced by robots.

 

Please watch our video to find out more, and feel free to leave a comment below!

 

References

Amazon Mturk (2016), Frequently Asked Questions [Online], Available at: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=overview [Accessed 16 September 2016]

Fiver (2016), Year in Review [Online], at :https://www.fiverr.com/yearinreview/ [Accessed 17 September 2016]

Wauters, R. (2012). ‘Fiverr helps get things done for as little as $5, raises $15m from Accel and Bessemer’ [Online], Available at: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/05/03/fiverr-helps-get-things-done-for-as-little-as-5-raises-15m-from-accel-and-bessemer/ [Accessed 17 September 2016]

 

Williamson, V. (2014), ‘On the Ethics of Crowdsourced Research’ [Online], Available at: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/williamson/files/mturk_ps_081014.pdf [Accessed 17 september 2016]