Mechanism Design for Time Critical and Cost Critical Task Execution via Crowdsourcing

TL;DR

This paper investigates mechanism design in social network crowdsourcing for atomic tasks, focusing on cost and time optimization, and introduces approximate mechanisms that balance sybil-proofness and collapse-proofness.

Contribution

It formalizes the problem of incentivizing agents in networks for task execution and recruitment, and develops a family of mechanisms satisfying approximate desirable properties.

Findings

No mechanism satisfies all ideal properties simultaneously.

Introduces a parametrized family of payment mechanisms.

Characterizes approximate properties in cost and time critical settings.

Abstract

An exciting application of crowdsourcing is to use social networks in complex task execution. In this paper, we address the problem of a planner who needs to incentivize agents within a network in order to seek their help in executing an {\em atomic task} as well as in recruiting other agents to execute the task. We study this mechanism design problem under two natural resource optimization settings: (1) cost critical tasks, where the planner's goal is to minimize the total cost, and (2) time critical tasks, where the goal is to minimize the total time elapsed before the task is executed. We identify a set of desirable properties that should ideally be satisfied by a crowdsourcing mechanism. In particular, {\em sybil-proofness} and {\em collapse-proofness} are two complementary properties in our desiderata. We prove that no mechanism can satisfy all the desirable properties simultaneously. This leads us naturally to explore approximate versions of the critical properties. We focus our attention on approximate sybil-proofness and our exploration leads to a parametrized family of payment mechanisms which satisfy collapse-proofness. We characterize the approximate versions of the desirable properties in cost critical and time critical domain.