Incentive and reputation mechanisms for online crowdsourcing systems

Nowadays, online crowdsourcing services are quite common such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Google Helpouts. For such online services, it is important to attract "workers" to provide high-quality solutions to the "tasks" outsourced by "requesters". We present a unified study of incentive and reputation mechanisms for online crowdsourcing systems. We first design an mechanism to incentivize workers provide their maximum effort, which allows multiple workers to solve a task, splits the reward among workers based on requester evaluations of the solution quality. We design a reputation mechanism, which ensures that low-skilled workers do not provide low-quality solutions by tracking workers' historical contributions, and penalizing those workers having poor reputation. We show that our incentive and reputation mechanisms are robust against human biases in solution quality evaluation.

[1]  Milan Vojnovic,et al.  Crowdsourcing and all-pay auctions , 2009, EC '09.

[2]  Mihaela van der Schaar,et al.  Socially-optimal design of crowdsourcing platforms with reputation update errors , 2013, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing.

[3]  Duncan J. Watts,et al.  Financial incentives and the "performance of crowds" , 2009, SIGKDD Explor..

[4]  Yaron Singer,et al.  Pricing mechanisms for crowdsourcing markets , 2013, WWW.

[5]  Phuoc Tran-Gia,et al.  Cost-Optimal Validation Mechanisms and Cheat-Detection for Crowdsourcing Platforms , 2011, 2011 Fifth International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing.

[6]  Jeffrey Heer,et al.  Crowdsourcing graphical perception: using mechanical turk to assess visualization design , 2010, CHI.

[7]  David C. Parkes,et al.  Designing incentives for online question and answer forums , 2009, EC '09.

[8]  John C. S. Lui,et al.  Mathematical Modeling of Crowdsourcing Systems: Incentive Mechanism and Rating System Design , 2014, 2014 IEEE 22nd International Symposium on Modelling, Analysis & Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems.

[9]  Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis,et al.  Quality management on Amazon Mechanical Turk , 2010, HCOMP '10.

[10]  Mihaela van der Schaar,et al.  Reputation-based incentive protocols in crowdsourcing applications , 2011, 2012 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.

[11]  Wei Chen,et al.  Incentive mechanism and protocol design for crowdsourcing systems , 2014, 2014 52nd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton).

[12]  Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis Analyzing the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace , 2010, XRDS.