A Financial Incentive Mechanism for Truthful Reporting Assurance in Online Crowdsourcing Platforms

In today’s world, crowdsourcing is regarded as an effective strategy to deal with a high volume of small issues whose solutions can have their own complexities in systems. Moreover, requesters are currently providing hundreds of thousands of tasks in online job markets and workers need to perform these tasks to earn money. Thus far, various aspects of crowdsourcing including budget management, mechanism design for price management, forcing workers to behave truthfully in bidding prices, or maximized gains of crowdsourcing have been considered in different studies. One of the main existing challenges in crowdsourcing is how to ensure truthful reporting is provided by contributing workers. Since the amount of pay to workers is directly correlated with the number of tasks performed by them over a period of time, it can be predicted that strong incentives encourage them to carry out more tasks by giving untruthful answers (providing the first possible answer without examining it) in order to increase the amount of pay. However, crowdsourcing requesters need to obtain truthful reporting as an output of tasks assigned to workers. In this study, a mechanism was developed whose implementation in crowdsourcing could ensure truthful reporting by workers. The mechanism provided in this study was evaluated as more budget feasible and it was also fairer for requesters and workers due to its well-defined procedure.