Essays on Platform Agency in Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Digital platforms are socio-technical systems that enable interaction and exchange between distributed users through algorithmic and interface design. Within this broader category, crowdsourced systems mobilize labor, capital, or knowledge from large, decentralized user bases. Far from being neutral intermediaries, these platforms exercise active agency through their design choices, governance policies, and algorithmic decisions—fundamentally shaping participation patterns and resource flows. This dissertation examines platform agency in such crowdsourced systems across three essays. Essay 1 examines how crowdfunded prosocial lending platforms influence financial resource allocation by shaping lender attention via platform engagement. Essay 2 analyzes how driver–customer familiarity in crowdsourced delivery acts as a relational resource, improving delivery performance and suggesting pathways for more relationship-sensitive dispatch algorithms. Essay 3 takes a novel methodological outlook, integrating netnographic insights with NLP-based analysis, to understand crowdsourced delivery driver challenges and develop a configurational specification for a microworld simulation prototype. Together, these essays advance a unified argument: platforms are not neutral marketplaces but active orchestrators of crowd-based resources, with far-reaching implications for efficiency, equity, and resilience in supply chain systems and operations.