Understanding Volunteer Crowdsourcing from a Multiplex Perspective

Crowdsourcing is about leveraging information technologies to outsource tasks to a large group of people, who can either be paid workers or nonpaid workers. Differing from monetarily incentivized workers, nonpaid workers are more likely to be affected by coworking relationships. To explore the link between the network and volunteering behavior, we construct dynamic collaboration networks from 827,260 unique volunteers’ participation in 183,445 projects initiated by 74,556 nonprofit organizations over nine years in the capital city of China. Following a multiplex perspective, we allow each type of organization (i.e., school-based, community-based, other-based) to represent a separate network layer. We construct the measures of multiplex ties (i.e., social connections that are linked through multiple layers) and relational pluralism (i.e., involvement diversity in different layers). We find that volunteers with more multiplex ties and a lower level of relational pluralism have higher volunteering continuity and intensity of engagement, guaranteeing the supply of the volunteer labor force. However, they are less likely to explore unfamiliar organizations through interorganization movements. At a macro level, we show how the reduced interorganization movements impeded the development of small and newly established organizations. In addition, we show that incorporating these multiplexity measures improves the prediction of volunteer behavior by 5.390%, 1.624%, and 8.792% for continuity, movement, and engagement, respectively.