Assessing the Determinants of Information Accuracy in Coproduction

Coproduction is a way in which citizens are involved in delivery of public services. Earlier works in the coproduction literature focus on how citizen participation in government can help reduce costs and improve government services, but the study of how accurate the information gathered via coproduction has not yet been explored. This paper focuses on a coproduction mechanism with an explicit information gathering focus uses: 311 systems (call centers, websites, and smartphone apps). It utilizes the related crowdsourcing literature to better understand the potential errors of coproduction. This results show that task simplicity drives accurate, while task complexity drives inaccuracy. The results also demonstrate that the problems with coproduction are not always a problem of bad information, but poor program management (particularly response time to service requests)