Work Capacity of Freelance Markets: Fundamental Limits and Decentralized Schemes

Abstract

Crowdsourcing of jobs to online freelance markets is rapidly gaining popularity. Most crowdsourcing platforms are uncontrolled and offer freedom to customers and freelancers to choose each other. This works well for unskilled jobs (e.g., image classification) with no specific quality requirement since freelancers are functionally identical. For skilled jobs (e.g., software development) with specific quality requirements, however, this does not ensure that the maximum number of job requests is satisfied. In this work we determine the capacity of freelance markets, in terms of maximum satisfied job requests, and propose centralized schemes that achieve capacity. To ensure decentralized operation and freedom of choice for customers and freelancers, we propose simple schemes compatible with the operation of current crowdsourcing platforms that approximately achieve capacity. Further, for settings where the number of job requests exceeds capacity, we propose a scheme that is agnostic of that information, but is optimal and fair in declining jobs without wait.