2 research outputs found
Finish Them!: Pricing Algorithms for Human Computation
Given a batch of human computation tasks, a commonly ignored aspect is how
the price (i.e., the reward paid to human workers) of these tasks must be set
or varied in order to meet latency or cost constraints. Often, the price is set
up-front and not modified, leading to either a much higher monetary cost than
needed (if the price is set too high), or to a much larger latency than
expected (if the price is set too low). Leveraging a pricing model from prior
work, we develop algorithms to optimally set and then vary price over time in
order to meet a (a) user-specified deadline while minimizing total monetary
cost (b) user-specified monetary budget constraint while minimizing total
elapsed time. We leverage techniques from decision theory (specifically, Markov
Decision Processes) for both these problems, and demonstrate that our
techniques lead to upto 30\% reduction in cost over schemes proposed in prior
work. Furthermore, we develop techniques to speed-up the computation, enabling
users to leverage the price setting algorithms on-the-fly