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Award: CrowdCO-OP: Sharing Risks and Rewards in Crowdsourcing

Award: CrowdCO-OP: Sharing Risks and Rewards in Crowdsourcing

Dr Alessandro Checco

A joint work between the University of Queensland, the University of Hanover, and the University of Sheffield titled CrowdCO-OP: Sharing Risks and Rewards in Crowdsourcing has received an Honorable Mention Award at the prestigious Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020).

The work focused on paid micro-task crowdsourcing. This type of labour has gained in popularity mainly because of the increasing need for large-scale manually labelled datasets which are often used to train and evaluate Artificial Intelligence systems. Modern paid crowdsourcing platforms use a piecework approach to rewards, meaning that workers are paid for each task they complete, given that their work quality is considered sufficient by the requester or the platform. Such an approach creates risks for workers: their work may be rejected without being rewarded, and they may be working on poorly rewarded tasks, in light of the disproportionate time required to complete them. As a result, recent research has shown that crowd workers may tend to choose specific, simple, and familiar tasks and avoid new requesters to manage these risks.

In this work, we propose a novel crowdsourcing reward mechanism that allows workers to share these risks and achieve a standardized hourly wage equal for all participating workers. Reward-focused workers can thereby take up challenging and complex HITs without bearing the financial risk of not being rewarded for completed work. We experimentally compare different crowd reward schemes and observe their impact on worker performance and satisfaction. Our results show that 1) workers clearly perceive the benefits of the proposed reward scheme, 2) work effectiveness and efficiency are not impacted as compared to those of the piecework scheme, and 3) the presence of slow workers is limited and does not disrupt the proposed cooperation-based approaches.

A pre-print of this work is available at this link.

For any questions feel free to contact Alessandro Checco at a.checco@sheffield.ac.uk.

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