Dynamic Contract Design for Heterogenous Workers in Crowdsourcing for Quality Control Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • 2017 IEEE. Crowdsourcing sites heavily rely on paid workers to ensure completion of tasks. Yet, designing a pricing strategies able to incentivize users' quality and retention is non trivial. Existing payment strategies either simply set a fixed payment per task without considering changes in workers' behaviors, or rule out poor quality responses and workers based on coarse criteria. Hence, task requesters may be investing significantly in work that is inaccurate or even misleading. In this paper, we design a dynamic contract to incentivize high-quality work. Our proposed approach offers a theoretically proven algorithm to calculate the contract for each worker in a cost-efficient manner. In contrast to existing work, our contract design is not only adaptive to changes in workers' behavior, but also adjusts pricing policy in the presence of malicious behavior. Both theoretical and experimental analysis over real Amazon review traces show that our contract design can achieve a near optimal solution. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate that our contract design 1) can promote high-quality work and prevent malicious behavior, and 2) outperforms the intuitive strategy of excluding all malicious workers in terms of the requester's utility.

name of conference

  • 2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)

published proceedings

  • 2017 IEEE 37TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SYSTEMS (ICDCS 2017)

author list (cited authors)

  • Qiu, C., Squicciarini, A. C., Rajtmajer, S. M., & Caverlee, J.

citation count

  • 9

complete list of authors

  • Qiu, Chenxi||Squicciarini, Anna Cinzia||Rajtmajer, Sarah Michele||Caverlee, James

editor list (cited editors)

  • Lee, K., & Liu, L.

publication date

  • June 2017