Are Crowdsourcing Platforms Confusing Quantity and Quality?

“With hundreds of responses, there is sure to be a good one.”
Too many crowdsourcing platforms today have confused quality with quantity.  Quality control today is too often moderated only by the large number of responses a project host receives from the crowd. This approach often works because with hundreds of responses, there is sure to be a good one. But it leaves the project host with the need to sort the wheat from the chafe and is limited in its ability to produce a large number of great solutions.

This fact is due largely to the pricing strategy used by crowdsourcing platforms.  The pricing strategy is seen as a binary decision: charge the project host to tap the wisdom of the crowd. The crowd can participate for free.

With very little cost (in terms of time or money) to join, the crowd has equally low expectations of a return on investment (ROI). At the extreme, there is no expectation of getting paid for one’s contribution so there is no focus on quality of the work product.

Perhaps the crowd should be charged to participate…?
The Harvard Business Review explored this issue many years ago in the paper titled, Strategies for Two-Sided Markets.  Eisenmann and the others argued that perhaps the supplier of quality (in this case that is the crowd) should be charged to participate in a two-sided platform.

The logic goes that increasing the cost (time or money) to join means that the expectation for reward in the form of compensation or recognition will also increase. When a member of the crowd has higher expectation they will increase the quality of their work.  For example, the quality of games on PlayStation 3 are of much better quality, yet fewer in quantity, than the games in the App Store.  PlayStation development has higher setup costs than iPhone development which can be seen in the quality of the games. There are no burping or vomiting games on PS3.

So far, platforms have only implemented non-monetary costs to join.
Crowdsourcing platforms such as GRSelect (related to Genius Rocket) and Maven Research have used long applications and [somewhat] stringent screening criteria to dissuade fly-by-night individuals from joining the crowd.

Certification processes have also been used. Trada, for example, requires all of its PPC consultants to be Google AdWords certified.

Would a fee to join the crowd shift the focus from quantity to quality?
Other forms of screening such as a user’s rank on a platform have also been used on a limited basis. But to my knowledge, no platforms have charged individuals a monetary fee to join the crowd. What do you think…would a fee to join the crowd shift the focus from quantity to quality? And, is this a good thing?