Title
Best of both worlds: Mitigating imbalance of crowd worker strategic choices without a budget.
Abstract
Crowdsourcing has become a popular paradigm for requesters to hire ubiquitous crowd workers. The worker’s selfish instinct of choosing the most profitable task can cause the imbalance of task completion: some tasks achieve a number of redundant worker choices, while others may receive no worker response. Although budget-based incentives can mitigate the imbalance of crowd workers’ strategic choices, the extra budget makes them less attractive. To mitigate task completion imbalance without a budget, a price mediation mechanism is proposed. This mechanism works by allowing the crowdsourcing platforms to implicitly adjust task prices, thereby eliciting workers to balance their choices. The price adjustment should be carefully designed to satisfy (1) task completion integrity and (2) no extra budget, while it maximizes social welfare. We prove that this optimization problem is NP-hard to solve. By designing bound function and pruning strategies, we propose an optimal branch-and-bound algorithm for small-scale instances. To further improve the scalability for large-scale instances, a heuristic method based on price transfers is proposed. Experimental results on a real dataset show that compared with benchmarks, our approaches are effective for maximizing social welfare and are beneficial to both requesters and workers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1016/j.knosys.2018.10.030
Knowledge-Based Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Crowdsourcing,Imbalance,Price mediation,Social welfare
Heuristic,Incentive,Computer science,Crowdsourcing,Operations research,Mediation (Marxist theory and media studies),Artificial intelligence,Instinct,Optimization problem,Machine learning,Social Welfare,Scalability
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
163
0950-7051
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
30
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Peng Shi115816704.36
Manyu Zhao200.34
Wanyuan Wang3548.55
Yifeng Zhou4293.57
Jiuchuan Jiang5769.13
Jinyu Zhang6154.96
Yichuan Jiang734137.03
Zhifeng Hao865378.36