Companies that use crowdsourcing use this leverage of respect, evaluation, and achievement in order to add value to their offerings, and there are many companies that do this (I even used to work for one). Although on first glance it seems suspect, they are acting rationally and ethically, because all of the participants are willingly putting their effort into the transaction without coercion. These participants do not trade their time for nothing though. They trade time for respect, and they prize the results of their labor. Think of how popular the achievement system is for gaming systems and websites (like the XBox and Kongegrate) and you can see how powerful a force this is when it’s quantified.

This is where your quandary comes in: how can you be sure that the effort that you put into such a transaction will be worth it when it’s not quantified? One red paperclip guy was able to get his house through the art of arbitrage, IE trading in separate markets with a price differential enough to make a profit. There’s no good way to get around this issue until some numerical value (or vector of numbers for that matter) in some unit of respect (for example, the concept of Whuffie in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Doctorow) is established and enough time is allowed for honest arbitrage to occur to stabilize this market.

Until that point, your working in a murky pool of a market. However, it’s not a futile affair. I work under the assumption that I give nothing away. Everything I do is for some transaction, even if the transaction is work solely for my own enjoyment or satisfaction.