A game-based mechanism for managing 2-decomposable tasks in competitive crowdsourcing environments

ABSTRACT

With the rapid development of social platforms and human activities, people are now interested to solve their problems with the help of the social crowd-powered system. So, crowdsourcing has become a promising way of solving problems in a distributed manner within a specific time. Crowd workers pick up a task (simple or complex) and solve it with competing interest or collaboratively and receive an incentive (as monetary or non-monetary). In paid crowdsourcing platforms, crowd workers solve complex tasks and get remunerations through prior bidding or prior announcement of fee decided by the requester (task provider). For decomposable tasks, a single winner may not provide a significant solution to the requester due to the insufficient knowledge. So, we induce collaboration in competitive crowdsourcing markets to better handle decomposable-type tasks. In this paper, we propose an envelope game-based mechanism that ensures if the tasks are decomposable then the workers will be encouraged to collaborate with their subtasks and share their remunerations. This mechanism also increases the chance of receiving more number of cost-effective solutions. Thus both the requester and crowd workers get benefits from the system. The effectiveness of the proposed mechanism is evaluated through empirical analysis on simulated environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Crowdsourcing
• Mechanism design
• Competitive market
• Collaborative work

Acknowledgments

We are especially thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their scrupulous comments, which have greatly helped to improve the content and clarity of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Amazon Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com)

2 Flightfox (https://www.flightfox.com)

3 Microtask (https://www.Microtask.com)

4 Upwork (https://www.upwork.com/)

5 CloudCrowd (https://www.cloudcrowd.com)

6 99designs (https://99designs.com)

7 TaskRabbit (https://www.taskrabbit.com/)