26 research outputs found
Incentivizing High-quality Content from Heterogeneous Users: On the Existence of Nash Equilibrium
We study the existence of pure Nash equilibrium (PNE) for the mechanisms used
in Internet services (e.g., online reviews and question-answer websites) to
incentivize users to generate high-quality content. Most existing work assumes
that users are homogeneous and have the same ability. However, real-world users
are heterogeneous and their abilities can be very different from each other due
to their diverse background, culture, and profession. In this work, we consider
heterogeneous users with the following framework: (1) the users are
heterogeneous and each of them has a private type indicating the best quality
of the content she can generate; (2) there is a fixed amount of reward to
allocate to the participated users. Under this framework, we study the
existence of pure Nash equilibrium of several mechanisms composed by different
allocation rules, action spaces, and information settings. We prove the
existence of PNE for some mechanisms and the non-existence of PNE for some
mechanisms. We also discuss how to find a PNE for those mechanisms with PNE
either through a constructive way or a search algorithm
A Puff of Steem: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation
Decentralized content curation is the process through which uploaded posts are ranked and filtered based exclusively on users\u27 feedback. Platforms such as the blockchain-based Steemit employ this type of curation while providing monetary incentives to promote the visibility of high quality posts according to the perception of the participants. Despite the wide adoption of the platform very little is known regarding its performance and resilience characteristics. In this work, we provide a formal model for decentralized content curation that identifies salient complexity and game-theoretic measures of performance and resilience to selfish participants. Armed with our model, we provide a first analysis of Steemit identifying the conditions under which the system can be expected to correctly converge to curation while we demonstrate its susceptibility to selfish participant behaviour. We validate our theoretical results with system simulations in various scenarios
Internationalisation of SMEs and firm performance: evidences from Bangladesh
One of the key objectives of this paper is to identify the impacts of internationalisation of
SMEs on firm performance. Although there have been a number of research that examined
the relationship between SME internationalisation and firm performance, research from the
context of smaller developing economies are really scant. This is against the fact that SMEs
are main vehicle for growth in those economies and extensive research on various dimensions
of SMEs including its impact on firm performance may help to better understand the
operational aspects of SMEs in those economies. Using primary data and structural equation
modelling to analyse those data, the paper has found that internationalisation of SMEs has
significant impact on both financial and non-financial performance of SMEs in Bangladesh.
More specifically, the paper has found that internationalisation impacts in two dimensions
(Financial impacts and non-financial impacts) with 8 indicators (higher sales, higher profit,
assets maximization, market expansion, competitive advantage, better reputation, better
customer service and added knowledge)
Gig Economy: A Dynamic Principal-Agent Model
The gig economy, where employees take short-term, project-based jobs, is
increasingly spreading all over the world. In this paper, we investigate the
employer's and the worker's behavior in the gig economy with a dynamic
principal-agent model. In our proposed model the worker's previous decisions
influence his later decisions through his dynamically changing participation
constraint. He accepts the contract offered by the employer when his expected
utility is higher than the irrational valuation of his effort's worth. This
reference point is based on wages he achieved in previous rounds. We formulate
the employer's stochastic control problem and derive the solution in the
deterministic limit. We obtain the feasible net wage of the worker, and the
profit of the employer. Workers who can afford to go unemployed and need not
take a gig at all costs will realize high net wages. Conversely, far-sighted
employers who can afford to stall production will obtain high profits
Surprising Results from Large Crowds Using Micro-Purchase Challenges - Using Contests on Freelancing Communities to Source Innovative, Impactful and Cost-Effective Solutions
Our world is more connected than ever before. The new digital economy is empowering platforms and crowds to become a progressively strategic way for organizations to innovate ahead of their competition. Existing research shows the effectiveness and quality of solutions crowdsourcing yields, yet few organizations genuinely understand it nor are leveraging those solutions to unlock the full range of benefits. Moreover, early adopters often face structural and financial barriers towards evangelizing digital platforms at scale within their organizations. NASA is an exception - being an advocate of the field since 2010, it has paved the path for large organizations to follow. An empirical analysis is conducted on NASA's Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) micro-purchase challenges on a crowd-based platform to assess the cost-savings, quality of work, time for work turnaround and brand effects of using this problem-solving mechanism. The results proved to provide a tangible impact on all four parameters. As such, micro-purchases could become a compelling entry-point for organizations who are willing to experiment and subsequently build a convincing business case to present to stakeholders. The paper concludes with NASA's learnings, supplemented by literature, on how to redesign business processes, change conventional thinking and create an organization that will transform its future with crowds
Adaptive Contract Design for Crowdsourcing Markets: Bandit Algorithms for Repeated Principal-Agent Problems
Crowdsourcing markets have emerged as a popular platform for matching
available workers with tasks to complete. The payment for a particular task is
typically set by the task's requester, and may be adjusted based on the quality
of the completed work, for example, through the use of "bonus" payments. In
this paper, we study the requester's problem of dynamically adjusting
quality-contingent payments for tasks. We consider a multi-round version of the
well-known principal-agent model, whereby in each round a worker makes a
strategic choice of the effort level which is not directly observable by the
requester. In particular, our formulation significantly generalizes the
budget-free online task pricing problems studied in prior work.
We treat this problem as a multi-armed bandit problem, with each "arm"
representing a potential contract. To cope with the large (and in fact,
infinite) number of arms, we propose a new algorithm, AgnosticZooming, which
discretizes the contract space into a finite number of regions, effectively
treating each region as a single arm. This discretization is adaptively
refined, so that more promising regions of the contract space are eventually
discretized more finely. We analyze this algorithm, showing that it achieves
regret sublinear in the time horizon and substantially improves over
non-adaptive discretization (which is the only competing approach in the
literature).
Our results advance the state of art on several different topics: the theory
of crowdsourcing markets, principal-agent problems, multi-armed bandits, and
dynamic pricing.Comment: This is the full version of a paper in the ACM Conference on
Economics and Computation (ACM-EC), 201
The Anchoring Effect of “Quality Threshold for Monetary Incentive” on Online Review Platforms
The “quality threshold for monetary incentive” mechanism is a common practice in online review platforms. However, the effect of the quality threshold is still not clear in the extant literature. This study attempts to investigate how the introduction of the quality threshold affects content quality. Based on the Anchoring Effect theory, this study first derives some theoretical conclusions based on theoretical models and then conducts a natural experiment to test the conclusions. The findings show that after introducing the quality threshold, (1) the proportion of content with the threshold-level quality will increase; (2) the proportion of content higher than the quality threshold is reduced when there is the “Anchoring Effect”. Moreover, the empirical study also shows that the quality threshold leads to an overall negative effect on the average review quality. Our findings are meaningful to the stakeholders of the online review platforms