The price of the priceless: Understanding estimated costs of work in friendsourcing

Friendsourcing, or outsourcing tasks to one's online and offline friends, is increasingly common and versatile. As regular crowdsourcing, friendsourcing requesters needs to incentivize potential workers (i.e., friends) to actually engage and complete the requested tasks. However, it is unclear how to effectively motivate friendsourcing workers and what incentives, which may include both social and monetary ones, are considered feasible in friendsourcing, especially by taking social relations between requesters and workers as part of the calculation. In an exploratory study, we asked participants to report their estimations of feasible payment as a requester, and reward as a worker in friendsourcing. We compare the estimated costs of friendsourcing to regular crowdsourcing, and find that there exists a gap between requesters' and workers' expected costs. Individuals would like to pay more as a requester, and expect to receive less as a worker in friendsourcing. Consideration of social transaction and relationship maintenance is involved. We discuss the implications for designing friendsourcing systems.