  Can Crowds serve as useful allies in policy design? How do non-expert Crowds
perform relative to experts in the assessment of policy measures? Does the
geographic location of non-expert Crowds, with relevance to the policy context,
alter the performance of non-experts Crowds in the assessment of policy
measures? In this work, we investigate these questions by undertaking
experiments designed to replicate expert policy assessments with non-expert
Crowds recruited from Virtual Labor Markets. We use a set of ninety-six climate
change adaptation policy measures previously evaluated by experts in the
Netherlands as our control condition to conduct experiments using two discrete
sets of non-expert Crowds recruited from Virtual Labor Markets. We vary the
composition of our non-expert Crowds along two conditions: participants
recruited from a geographical location directly relevant to the policy context
and participants recruited at-large. We discuss our research methods in detail
and provide the findings of our experiments.
