Citizen Science, Platforms, and Project Implementation

We examine the impact of citizen science on the digital economy by investigating the incentives of citizens, scientists, and digital platforms to implement a scientific project. We build a simple model where a two-sided platform supplies citizen science services to two scientists on one side, and a representative citizen on the other side. Project implementation brings a social value benefiting each project contributor. When there is no platform, a scientist decides between citizen science project implementation and an outside option. A project may be implemented with some probability depending on citizen’s attention devoted to the project. We find three possible scenarios of project implementation depending on the social value of a project, the probability of implementation, and the opportunity cost of citizen science. With a platform, scenarios of project implementation can be reversed compared to the benchmark with no platform, and citizen science projects with lower social value could be implemented.