Team Dating: A Self-Organized Team Formation Strategy for Collaborative Crowdsourcing

Online crowds have the potential to do more complex work in teams, rather than as individuals. However, at such a large scale, team formation can be difficult to coordinate. (How) can we rely on the crowd itself to organize into effective teams? Our research explores a strategy for "team dating", a self-organized crowd team formation approach where workers try out and rate different candidate partners. In two online experiments, we find that team dating affects the way that people select partners and how they evaluate them. We use these results to draw useful conclusions for the future of team dating and its implications for collaborative crowdsourcing.