MELODY: A Long-Term Dynamic Quality-Aware Incentive Mechanism for Crowdsourcing

Hongwei Wang, Song Guo, Jiannong Cao, Minyi Guo

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

20 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Crowdsourcing allows requesters to allocate tasks to a group of workers on the Internet to make use of their collective intelligence. Quality control is a key design objective in incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing as requesters aim at obtaining answers of high quality under a given budget. However, when measuring workers' long-term quality, existing mechanisms either fail to utilize workers' historical information, or treat workers' quality as stable and ignore its temporal characteristics, hence performing poorly in a long run. In this paper we propose MELODY, a long-term dynamic quality-aware incentive mechanism for crowdsourcing. MELODY models interaction between requesters and workers as reverse auctions that run continuously. In each run of MELODY, we design a truthful, individual rational, budget feasible and quality-aware algorithm for task allocation with polynomial-time computation complexity and O(1) performance ratio. Moreover, taking into consideration the long-term characteristics of workers' quality, we propose a novel framework in MELODY for quality inference and parameters learning based on Linear Dynamical Systems at the end of each run, which takes full advantage of workers' historical information and predicts their quality accurately. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that MELODY outperforms existing work in terms of both quality estimation (reducing estimation error by 17.6% ~ 24.2%) and social performance (increasing requester's utility by 18.2% ~ 46.6%) in long-term scenarios.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2017
EditorsKisung Lee, Ling Liu
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages933-943
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781538617915
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Jul 2017
Event37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2017 - J.W. Marriott Hotel, Atlanta, United States
Duration: 5 Jun 20178 Jun 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

Conference

Conference37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta
Period5/06/178/06/17

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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