No “One-Size Fits all”, Towards a principled approach for incentives in mobile crowdsourcing

Motivation

Today, gathering of data for mobile applications through crowdsourcing is becoming popular where in apps use cloud for computation. Participants who use crowdsourcing applications are major stakeholders in this domain. Thus, it encourages principled methodologies to increase people using these applications, enhance quality of data collected through applications by providing incentives in the form of rewards such as monetary, social and gaming. A Principled approach for incentives gives a great platform for success of mobile crowdsourcing applications.

Key Points

     ·  Authors carried out an experiment over 2 days at a Mobile Research Technical conference to              study the outcomes of principled incentives offered by crowdsource applications.

•  The crowdsource application used was a virtual scavenger hunt game and incentives were offered to the participants. Here 2 incentive structures were used on 2 consecutive days- Micro-Payments and Weighted Lottery. Micro Payments involved less investment by the host but guaranteed small portions of monetary benefits to the participants upon completion of different stages of the application. On the other hand weighted lottery involved more investment by the host and monetary benefits (raffle tickets winner) were provided based on probability to the participants
• The results of this experiment were studied under broad metrics such as

1.  Recruitment- To study the number of users who used the applications under both incentive programs. Weighted lottery outscored micro-payments in this domain motivating more people to use the application.
2.   Compliance- To study the number of tasks successfully completed by the participants. Micro payment incentive had more productive participants completing more number of tasks in the app game.
3.   User Effort- Active time and passive times of application usage by the participants using the application. Micro payments outperformed weighted lottery in reference to active user times.

•   The experiment was held to demonstrate the similarity of outcomes to a mobile crowdsource application in a larger environment taking the same metrics into account.
•   It is concluded by the authors, as to choose different incentives for different metrics priority as desired by the host for the application.

Trade-offs

1.   Authors do not consider other parameters which may affect the 3 metrics such as age and diversity of the crowd. As young and technical people may tend to use the scavenger application more at the conference.
2. Authors do not account for the same set of people attending conference on both days, as people who had used application on first day may not tend to try the same on second day.
3.  Authors do not mention if the level of difficultness of application was same on 2 days as it would have an adverse effect on user-effort.
4.  This paper only focuses on monetary incentives outcomes, future work could be carried out considering other incentives such as gaming and social.
5.   Authors relate survey done during conference to the wide crowdsourcing application domain successfully through the metrics.
6. Authors through an experiment, are successful in giving out a message to choose incentives in a principled fashion based on the priority goals set for the application by providers.