Incentive mechanism for the listing item task in crowdsourcing

Shaofei Wang, Depeng Dang

Abstract: Highlights • A formal definition for crowdsourcing listing item task was presented. • An incentive mechanism was proposed for the listing item task. • The mechanism was proved to be efficient both theoretically and experimentally. Abstract Crowdsourcing is a new strategy of leveraging intelligence from a large number of workers to complete tasks. An incentive mechanism is an effective way for improving the quality of answers in crowdsourcing. However, a special but common type of crowdsourcing task, called listing item task, has not been fully investigated. In this paper, we focus on the incentive mechanism for this listing item task. In particular, we first provide a formal definition of this task. Then, we propose an effective incentive mechanism considering both the precision and recall of the answers. Next, we prove that the proposed mechanism is incentive-compatible and satisfies no free lunch criterion. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments on our crowdsourcing platform CrowdKnow and a public platform ZhiDao. The experimental results demonstrate that our incentive mechanism achieves a remarkable improvement for listing item tasks compared with other related mechanisms.