Benutzer:Hayekian0409/draft

This article will be about the economist Friedrich August von Hayek Friedrich August von Hayek and the phenomenon labeled as "crowdsourcing". At the same time this article is an experiment in crowdsourcing by itself. I will suggest a general template as a suggestion how to structure the article - and then it is free to edit, to fill in, to expand and to sharpen the arguments. (Thus please do not downgrade this article as stubb, but feel free to edit and to add to the thoughts and arguments provided in this raw form. As soon as this article is in a proper shape delete this sentence and the one before it. Thank you all you wikipedians!)

The underlying argument of the economist F. A. Hayek was that knowledge is dispersed in society. Markets and social networks like wikipedia are tools to bring that private knowledge to the surface. Unlike mainstream economists, Hayek and other propononts of the Austrian School of Economics state that the economic problem is not optimal allocation in a general equilibrium, but instead: “It [the economic problem] is the problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.”

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call. Jeff Howe, one of the first authors to employ the term, established that the concept of crowdsourcing depends essentially on the fact that because it is an open call to an undefined group of people, it gathers those who are most fit to perform tasks, solve complex problems and contribute with the most relevant and fresh ideas. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science). The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

Creation Collective Knowledge

One Approach to analyze the phenomenon of crowdsourcing is to discuss different methods of collective knowledge creation. According to Lawrence Lessig there are at least four methods.

Method	How it works	Example
Statistical avarage	Beispiel	"Who wants to be a millionaire?"
Deliberation	Beispiel	Parlamentary debates, Team meetings
Markets / Prediction markets	Beispiel	Markets for goods and services, "Marketocracy"

Taxonomy of Crowdsourcing

Another approach to crowdsourcing is a classification or taxonomy according to other social technologies, i.e. institutions. According to classical economics, the productive activity is organized in part within organizations (collaborative) and while the coordination of these activites is organized by use of market prices (in a competitve manner). This would suggest a matrix of two dimensions. On the other hand one can distinguish forms of social organizations by their formality of bonds between their constituent members (either there are formal bonds like in a company) or there are informal bonds as in a community.

This taxonomy gives rise to a two dimensional matrix: one matrix is the type of bond between members (formal or informal/crowd) while the other is the collaborative or the competitive manner of contact respectively. Firms are in the quadrant that refers to "formal" and "collaborative" while markets correspond to "competitive" and "informal/crowd"

Crowdsourcing can either be collaborative (wikipedia) or competitive ("rent a coder", "InnoCentive"), but it is a new form of organization of economic activity that breaks out of the constraints of classical analysis.