Pricing tasks in online labor markets

Abstract

In this paper we present a mechanism for determining near-optimal prices for tasks in online labor markets, often used for crowdsourcing. In particular, the mechanisms are designed to handle the intricacies of markets like Mechanical Turk where workers arrive online and requesters have budget constraints. The mechanism is incentive compatible, budget feasible, and has competitive ratio performance and also performs well in practice. To demonstrate the mechanism’s practical effective-ness we conducted experiments on the Mechanical Turk plat-form. 1