  Crowdsourcing has gained popularity as a tool to harness human brain power to
help solve problems that are difficult for computers. Previous work in
crowdsourcing often assumes that workers complete crowdwork independently. In
this paper, we relax the independent property of crowdwork and explore how
introducing direct, synchronous, and free-style interactions between workers
would affect crowdwork. In particular, motivated by the concept of peer
instruction in educational settings, we study the effects of peer communication
in crowdsourcing environments. In the crowdsourcing setting with peer
communication, pairs of workers are asked to complete the same task together by
first generating their initial answers to the task independently and then
freely discussing the tasks with each other and updating their answers after
the discussion. We experimentally examine the effects of peer communication in
crowdwork on various common types of tasks on crowdsourcing platforms,
including image labeling, optical character recognition (OCR), audio
transcription, and nutrition analysis. Our experiment results show that the
work quality is significantly improved in tasks with peer communication
compared to tasks where workers complete the work independently. However,
participating in tasks with peer communication has limited effects on
influencing worker's independent performance in tasks of the same type in the
future.
