Addressing challenges in gamified paid microtask crowdsourcing using furtherance incentives

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has the potential to revolutionise the way organisations carry out tasks that need to scale out quickly – and indeed this revolution has begun. However, crowdsourcing today, and especially paid microtasks, face several technical and socio-economic challenges that can hamper the realisation of this vision. This work addresses four of such challenges: workflow design; real-time crowd work; motivation and rewards; and synchronous collaboration. The thesis describes the use of a bespoke gamified crowdsourcing platform Wordsmith, and studies the use of furtherance incentives to tackle issues at the heart of microtasks that feature monetary payments as the primary source of incentivisation. Furtherance incentives represent a timely and appropriate reward to improve task continuance presented when a worker is about to quit a task. As such, the keys to effectively deploying furtherance incentives lie in: the timely ability to detect waning worker interest in a task, and, knowledge of the appropriate incentive to offer the particular worker at that stage of the task. In understanding how to improve crowdsourcing workflow designs, the thesis presents an approach that leverages on insights into task features and worker interaction preferences. The findings illustrate how workers interact with tasks in the presence of choice – thus offering us an idea into the types of furtherance incentive to offer workers. In the study on real-time crowd work, microtask contests are introduced as a medium to engage workers to complete tasks featuring tight time constraints. The results give us a rich model that we use to predict when workers are likely to exit a task at different stages. The research into motivation and rewards combines the two components of furtherance incentives by using gamification elements as an additional source of incentives. This leads to more tasks carried out and at a higher quality when compare with baseline paid microtasks. Finally our study on synchronous collaboration offers an additional case study on the effectiveness of furtherance incentives. Here we use sociality-based features of social pressure and social flow between interacting workers as furtherance incentives resulting in improved qualitative and quantitative results.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Elena Simperl: orcid.org/0000-0003-1722-947X

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