AN AGENT BASED SIMULATION STUDY OF ASSOCIATION AMONGST CONTESTANTS IN CROWDSOURCING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT THROUGH PREFERENTIAL ATTACHMENT

Software development is creative, challenging and ever evolving. With the increasing deployment of cloud technologies and benefits of crowdsourcing, an emerging form of software development is Software Crowdsourcing. The members of the crowd use various platforms to participate in competitions of software design and development to earn reputation and reward. In this paper we analyze and model the association amongst contestants in a software crowdsourcing platform to earn reputation. Agent based modelling is being used to simulate actions of agents (contestants) and measure the resulting system behaviour and outcomes over time. We model the preferential attachment behavior amongst the contestants and analyze the data retrieved from a crowdsourced software platform. This research proposes that agents that compete together for a certain task are more likely to be associated with each other for future competitions.

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