A reputation-aware decision-making approach for improving the efficiency of crowdsourcing systems

A crowdsourcing system is a useful platform for utilizing the intelligence and skills of the mass. Nevertheless, like any open system that involves the exchange of things of value, selfish and malicious behaviors exist in crowdsourcing systems and need to be mitigated. Trust management has been proven to be a viable solution in many systems. However, a major difference between crowdsourcing systems and existing trust models designed for multi-agent systems is that human trustees have limited task processing capacity per unit time compared to an intelligent agent program. This paper recognizes a problem in current trust-aware decision-making methods for task assignment in crowdsourcing platforms. On the one hand, trust-based methods over-assign tasks to trusted workers, while on the other hand, workload-based solutions do not give sufficient guarantees on the quality of work. The proposed solution, the social welfare optimizing reputation-aware decision-making (SWORD) approach, strikes a balance between the two and is shown through extensive simulations to significantly improve social welfare of crowdsourcing platforms compared to related work.

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