Crowd Arbitration: Crowdsourced Dispute Resolution Part II

Crowd Arbitration: Crowdsourced Dispute Resolution Part II

Part I | Part III | Part IV | Part V

By: Leonora Camner

Crowdsourcing in dispute resolution

Crowdsourcing is a potential source of substantial benefits to dispute resolution. The main reason for these benefits is that crowdsourcing easily pools together the views of a large amount of people, far more than could be collected into a single room for arbitration or a courtroom. By moving dispute resolution into the virtual space, the physical limitations of dispute resolution are eliminated. As experiments with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowd intelligence platform show, crowdsourcing can be extremely efficient in time and money. Winter Mason & Siddarth Suri, Conducting Behavioral Research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, 44 BEHAV. RES. 1 (2012), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1691163.

The rise of mass online communications have the potential to change the options for dispute resolution. See John Gregory, Crowdsourced Online Dispute Resolution, SLAW MAGAZINE, Nov. 5, 2012, available at http://www.slaw.ca/2012/11/05/crowdsourced-online-dispute-resolution/. In a court or traditional arbitration proceeding, the decision-makers must be in the same room as the parties, evidence, and documents in order to resolve a particular dispute. The costs of going through arbitration or litigation can be prohibitive for claims with only small amounts under dispute. Many of these disputes are procedural; everyone involved must gather in a room and assemble briefs and documentation for each dispute about the process itself. An online crowd-sourced arbitration, on the other hand, can assemble thousands of people to review documents and provide resolution virtually for the same small cost as running a web forum.

The ease and low cost of crowd-sourced arbitration allows effective dispute resolution to be available to any party. Even lay people with no counsel can easily understand the process. A party does not need experience or much sophistication on the issues to upload his or her evidence. And because the decision-makers can be the general community, and not legal or technical professionals, the outcome will likely be intuitive and unsurprising to the layperson. The simplicity of the process, the lack of need for counsel, and the lack of costs for the process make this dispute resolution method available for almost anyone, for even minor disputes. With this method available, common disputes that are not worth bringing to court can finally be resolved, such as a freelancer not being paid for services, or conflicts between neighbors over property.

The next major benefit to consider is speed. Because crowd-sourced arbitration operates virtually, there is no need to arrange for everyone to hear the dispute at one time. Any crowd arbitrator may consider the evidence, discuss the dispute, and render a decision on his or her own time. Additionally, because the pool of crowd arbitrators is potentially very large, there will be many crowd arbitrators available to hear the dispute at any one time. While it may still take time for the parties to assemble their evidence and arguments, the timesaving potential of crowd arbitration makes it a beneficial option to even the most sophisticated parties.

Do these benefits of time and cost savings make crowd arbitration a less reliable means of dispute resolution?  Stay tuned to read Ms. Camner’s take on the matter.