دانلود رایگان مقاله جمع سپاری: تعریف تجدید نظر شده و معرفی به تحقیقات جدید

The shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others. (Hayek, 1945, p. 80) In economics, the distribution of such contextual knowledge is referred to as the local knowledge problem. It suggests that the information required for rational economic planning is spread across individual actors, and unavoidably exists outside the knowledge of a central authority (e.g., the firm, government bureaucracy, central bank). In the past, notable attempts have been made to tap into this distributed knowledge. For example, in 1714, the British government offered a monetary award–— known as the Longitude Prize–—for the best way to measure a ship’s longitudinal position. Likewise, in 1916, Planters Peanuts ran a public logo-design contest via which Mr. Peanut was created. In 1936, the Toyota logo was devised by means of a similar contest, as was the architecture of the Sydney Opera House in 1955. Despite these crowdsourcing successes, most early campaigns were limited by (1) organizers’ inability to reach large populations, (2) difficulties of participants to collaborate, and (3) pure inertia. As a result, managers could access only a fragment of local knowledge, and the vast majority of distributed contextual knowledge remained untapped. About a decade ago, a number of technological developments significantly reshaped how knowledge could be accessed and disseminated. In 2006, Google bought the then one-year-old video sharing startup, YouTube, for $1.65 billion (Associated Press, 2006). The same year, Twitter was founded and Facebook opened to the public. These platforms immediately changed how people could connect with each other and communicate with firms. Introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the subsequent diffusion of smart mobile devices revolutionized how people accessed and provided real-time data on the go. In only two years, the web changed fundamentally: it became both social and mobile. Amid the excitement of location-based services, user-generated videos, posts, and tweets, these important technological developments also significantly impacted the local knowledge problem.