A Contract for 'Crowds'

摘要

Recently, micro-task crowdsourcing has become an increasingly popular tool for many companies to access scalable and on-demand labor markets. However, it also poses novel challenges. In this study, we focus on two of these interrelated challenges, namely, designing an efficient payment scheme and assuring the quality of produced work. We first develop an economic model to explain the relation between pay and the quality of the produced work under the commonly used piece-rate payment scheme. Recognizing the inefficiency of this payment system, we then propose an alternative payment scheme to improve the quality of work in such marketplaces. To test our analytical findings, we perform two sets of experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results of the experiments show a significant improvement in the quality of work under the proposed payment scheme compared to that under the piece-rate payment scheme.