Double or Nothing: Multiplicative Incentive Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing. Shah, N. B & Zhou, D. arXiv.org, cs.GT, 2014.
abstract   bibtex   
Crowdsourcing has gained immense popularity in machine learning applications for obtaining large amounts of labeled data. Crowdsourcing is cheap and fast, but suffers from the problem of low-quality data. To address this fundamental challenge in crowdsourcing, we propose a simple payment mechanism to incentivize workers to answer only the questions that they are sure of and skip the rest. We show that surprisingly, under a mild and natural "no-free-lunch" requirement, this mechanism is the one and only incentive-compatible payment mechanism possible. We also show that among all possible incentive-compatible mechanisms (that may or may not satisfy no-free-lunch), our mechanism makes the smallest possible payment to spammers. We further extend our results to a more general setting in which workers are required to provide a quantized confidence for each question. Interestingly, this unique mechanism takes a "multiplicative" form. The simplicity of the mechanism is an added benefit. In preliminary experiments involving over 900 worker-task pairs, we observe a significant drop in the error rates under this unique mechanism for the same or lower monetary expenditure.
@Article{Shah2014a,
author = {Shah, Nihar B and Zhou, Dengyong}, 
title = {Double or Nothing: Multiplicative Incentive Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing}, 
journal = {arXiv.org}, 
volume = {cs.GT}, 
number = {}, 
pages = {}, 
year = {2014}, 
abstract = {Crowdsourcing has gained immense popularity in machine learning applications for obtaining large amounts of labeled data. Crowdsourcing is cheap and fast, but suffers from the problem of low-quality data. To address this fundamental challenge in crowdsourcing, we propose a simple payment mechanism to incentivize workers to answer only the questions that they are sure of and skip the rest. We show that surprisingly, under a mild and natural \"no-free-lunch\" requirement, this mechanism is the one and only incentive-compatible payment mechanism possible. We also show that among all possible incentive-compatible mechanisms (that may or may not satisfy no-free-lunch), our mechanism makes the smallest possible payment to spammers. We further extend our results to a more general setting in which workers are required to provide a quantized confidence for each question. Interestingly, this unique mechanism takes a \"multiplicative\" form. The simplicity of the mechanism is an added benefit. In preliminary experiments involving over 900 worker-task pairs, we observe a significant drop in the error rates under this unique mechanism for the same or lower monetary expenditure.}, 
location = {}, 
keywords = {}}

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