Reward or Penalty: Aligning Incentives of Stakeholders in Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a promising platform, whereby massive tasks are broadcasted to a crowd of semi-skilled workers by the requester for reliable solutions. In this paper, we consider four key evaluation indices of a crowdsourcing community (i.e., quality, cost, latency, and platform improvement), and demonstrate that these indices involve the interests of the three stakeholders, namely the requester, worker, and crowdsourcing platform. Since the incentives among these three stakeholders always conflict with each other, to elevate the long-term development of the crowdsourcing community, we take the perspective of the whole crowdsourcing community, and design a crowdsourcing mechanism to align incentives of stakeholders together. Specifically, we give workers reward or penalty according to their reporting solutions instead of only nonnegative payment. Furthermore, we find a series of proper reward-penalty function pairs and compute workers personal order values, which can provide different amounts of reward and penalty according to both the workers reporting beliefs and their individual history performances, and keep the incentive of workers at the same time. The proposed mechanism can help latency control, promote quality and platform evolution of crowdsourcing community, and improve the aforementioned four key evaluation indices. Theoretical analysis and experimental results are provided to validate and evaluate the proposed mechanism, respectively.