Preventing participation of insincere workers in crowdsourcing by using pay-for-performance payments

Abstract

We propose a method for finding an appropriate setting of a pay-per-performance payment system to prevent participation of insincere workers in crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing enables fast and low-cost accomplishment of tasks; however, insincere workers prevent the task requester from obtaining high-quality results. Instead of a fixed payment system, the pay-per-performance payment system is promising for excluding insincere workers. However, it is difficult to learn what settings are better, and a naive payment setting may cause unsatisfactory outcomes. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a method for calculating the expected payments for sincere and insincere workers, and then clarifying the conditions in the payment setting in which sincere workers are willing to choose a task, while insincere workers are not willing to choose the task. We evaluated the proposed method by conducting several experiments on tweet labeling tasks in Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results suggest that the pay-per-performance system is useful for preventing participation of insincere workers. Copyright © 2014 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.