Articles: Crowdsourcing Arbitration: Using Technology to Leverage Collective Intelligence

This article examines the use of crowdsourced dispute resolution as a means of resolving disputes in an unbiased, evaluative fashion. The advantages of aggregated collective intelligence over single evaluators have been demonstrated for centuries, but coordination has always been a challenge. Now technology has significantly improved opportunities for coordination, making crowdsourced online dispute resolution (CODR) mechanisms much more feasible. The authors present a framework for crowdsourced arbitration and then apply it to three case studies: the Community Court at eBay.com, the crowdsourced justice system at the Chinese e-commerce site Taobao, and the Kleros crowdsourced jury system. The advantages and challenges of each system are discussed, along with conclusions around the efficacy and utility of crowdsourced arbitration in other applications moving forward.