Automated agents for reward determination for human work in crowdsourcing applications

Crowdsourcing applications frequently employ many individual workers, each performing a small amount of work. In such settings, individually determining the reward for each assignment and worker may seem economically beneficial, but is inapplicable if manually performed. We thus consider the problem of designing automated agents for automatic reward determination and negotiation in such settings. We formally describe this problem and show that it is NP-hard. We therefore present two automated agents for the problem, based on two different models of human behavior. The first, the Reservation Price Based Agent (RPBA), is based on the concept of a RP, and the second, the No Bargaining Agent (NBA) which tries to avoid any negotiation. The performance of the agents is tested in extensive experiments with real human subjects, where both NBA and RPBA outperform strategies developed by human experts.