Crowd-sourcing with uncertain quality - an auction approach

This article addresses two important issues in crowd-sourcing: ex ante uncertainty about the quality and cost of different workers and strategic behaviour. We present a novel multi-dimensional auction that incentivises the workers to make partial enquiry into the task and to honestly report quality-cost estimates based on which the crowd-sourcer can choose the worker that offers the best value for money. The mechanism extends second score auction design to settings where the quality is uncertain and it provides incentives to both collect information and deliver desired qualities

The roles of incentives and voluntary cooperation for contractual compliance

Efficiency under contractual incompleteness often requires voluntary cooperation in situations where self-regarding incentives for contractual compliance are present as well. Here we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis based on the gift-exchange game of how explicit and implicit incentives affect cooperation. We first show that there is substantial cooperation under non-incentive compatible contracts. Incentive-compatible contracts induce best-reply effort and crowd out any voluntary cooperation. Further experiments show that this result is robust to two important variables: experiencing Trust contracts without any incentives and implicit incentives coming from repeated interaction. Implicit incentives have a strong positive effect on effort only under non-incentive compatible contracts.principal-agent games; gift-exchange experiments; incomplete contracts, explicit incentives; implicit incentives; repeated games; separability; experiments

The Roles of Incentives and Voluntary Cooperation for Contractual Compliance

Efficiency under contractual incompleteness often requires voluntary cooperation in situations where self-regarding incentives for contractual compliance are present as well. Here we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis based on the gift-exchange game of how explicit and implicit incentives affect cooperation. We first show that there is substantial cooperation under non-incentive compatible contracts. Incentive-compatible contracts induce best-reply effort and crowd out any voluntary cooperation. Further experiments show that this result is robust to two important variables: experiencing Trust contracts without any incentives and implicit incentives coming from repeated interaction. Implicit incentives have a strong positive effect on effort only under non-incentive compatible contracts.principal-agent games, gift-exchange experiments, incomplete contracts, explicit incentives, implicit incentives, repeated games, separability, experiments

Do Financial Incentives Reduce Intrinsic Motivation for Weight Loss? Evidence from Two Tests of Crowding Out

Financial incentives have been used successfully to promote health behaviors, however they may be counterproductive if they crowd out pre-existing intrinsic motivation and lead to a decrease in performance once incentives are removed to a level lower than they had never been introduced. We provide new evidence that incentives do not crowd out intrinsic motivation in the case of weight loss. We measure motivation via a survey administered before and after the introduction of financial incentives in two weight loss field experiments and find no evidence that intrinsic motivation fell among participants receiving incentives compared to control participants who do not receive incentives

Not All Incentives Wash Out the Warm Glow: The Case of Blood Donation Revisited

The issue of the nature of the altruism inherent in blood donation and the perverse effects of financial rewards for blood and/or organ donation has been recently revisited in the economic literature with limited consensus. As Titmuss (1970) famously pointed out, providing monetary incentives to blood donors may crowd out blood supply as purely altruistic donors may feel less inclined to donate if a reward is involved - in addition to having the effect of reducing blood quality. In this paper we take a different approach by focusing on the nature of the rewards. That is, we examine how favouring different types of incentives are related to the likelihood of donating blood by exploiting a large sample representative of 15 European countries in 2002. Our results show that donors are less likely to favour monetary rewards for blood donation but are more likely to favour non-monetary ones. This is consistent with the idea that while monetary rewards may crowd out blood donation, non-monetary rewards do not.altruism, blood donation, incentives, nudging, recursive system, warm glow

Optimizing Wirelessly Powered Crowd Sensing: Trading energy for data

To overcome the limited coverage in traditional wireless sensor networks, \emph{mobile crowd sensing} (MCS) has emerged as a new sensing paradigm. To achieve longer battery lives of user devices and incentive human involvement, this paper presents a novel approach that seamlessly integrates MCS with wireless power transfer, called \emph{wirelessly powered crowd sensing} (WPCS), for supporting crowd sensing with energy consumption and offering rewards as incentives. The optimization problem is formulated to simultaneously maximize the data utility and minimize the energy consumption for service operator, by jointly controlling wireless-power allocation at the \emph{access point} (AP) as well as sensing-data size, compression ratio, and sensor-transmission duration at \emph{mobile sensor} (MS). Given the fixed compression ratios, the optimal power allocation policy is shown to have a \emph{threshold}-based structure with respect to a defined \emph{crowd-sensing priority} function for each MS. Given fixed sensing-data utilities, the compression policy achieves the optimal compression ratio. Extensive simulations are also presented to verify the efficiency of the contributed mechanisms.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1711.0206

Crowdsourcing for Sustainable Urban Logistics: Exploring the Factors Influencing Crowd Workers’ Participative Behavior

With crowd logistics becoming a crucial part of the last-mile delivery challenge in many cities, continued participation of crowd workers has become an essential issue affecting the growth of the crowd logistics platform. Understanding how people are motivated to continue their participation in crowd logistics can provide some clarity as to what policies and measures should be undertaken by the industry to support its further growth. Using the Push-Pull-Mooring (PPM) theory, we developed a research model to explain the factors influencing crowd workers' participative behavior. Survey data from 455 crowd workers were analyzed using SmartPLS3.0 software. The results show monetary rewards and trust have a significant positive impact on the willingness of crowd workers to continue participating in crowd logistics, while work enjoyment from previous work and entry barriers for work have a significant negative impact. Trust plays an intermediary role between monetary incentives and crowd workers' willingness to continue participating. Based on the findings of this study, we recommend that crowd logistics platforms should offer reasonable monetary incentives and keep these under constant review, build a high degree of trust and cooperation with their crowd workers, and initiate activities geared towards promoting satisfaction at work

Participation Cost Estimation: Private Versus Non-Private Study

In our study, we seek to learn the real-time crowd levels at popular points of interests based on users continually sharing their location data. We evaluate the benefits of users sharing their location data privately and non-privately, and show that suitable privacy-preserving mechanisms provide incentives for user participation in a private study as compared to a non-private study

Viewers like you: community norms and contributions to public broadcasting

The logic of collective action (Olson 1965) suggests that public broadcasting may be underprovided, because non-contributors are not excluded from receiving the benefits. Why do so many individuals voluntarily contribute to public television, even though they can obtain the benefits of public television without contributing? We explore the hypothesis that giving to public broadcasting is determined in part by the strength of "civic norms" that limit the opportunistic behavior of individuals in large-numbers prisoners' dilemma settings. We also explore a variety of other explanations for charitable giving and collective action, including group size, tax deductibility, crowd out, and selective incentives. Our findings provide evidence linking civic norms and giving to public broadcasting. Education and income have indirect effects through strengthening civic norms. We find some evidence that selective incentives increase the average size of contributions among those who contribute.collective action, selective incentives, norms, free riding, social capital, public goods