# Generalized Lottery Trees: Budget-Consistent Incentive Tree Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing

## TL;DR

This paper introduces generalized lottree incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing that ensure budget consistency and incentivize ongoing contributions and solicitations, supported by theoretical analysis and empirical validation.

## Contribution

It is the first to propose budget-consistent incentive tree mechanisms, called generalized lottrees, supporting diverse requirements and providing theoretical guidance for mechanism selection.

## Key findings

- Mechanisms guarantee budget consistency and incentivize contributions.
- Theoretical analysis based on Cumulative Prospect Theory guides mechanism choice.
- Empirical experiments with 82 users validate the mechanisms' effectiveness.

## Abstract

Incentive mechanism design has aroused extensive attention for crowdsourcing applications in recent years. Most research assumes that participants are already in the system and aware of the existence of crowdsourcing tasks. Whereas in real life scenarios without this assumption, it is a more effective way to leverage incentive tree mechanisms that incentivize both users' direct contributions and solicitations to other users. Although some such mechanisms have been investigated, we are the first to propose budget-consistent incentive tree mechanisms, called generalized lottrees, which require the total payout to all participants to be consistent with the announced budget, while guaranteeing several other desirable properties including continuing contribution incentive, continuing solicitation incentive, value proportional to contribution, unprofitable solicitor bypassing, and unprofitable sybil attack. Moreover, we present three types of generalized lottree mechanisms, 1-Pachira, K-Pachira, and Sharing-Pachira, which support more diversified requirements. A solid theoretical guidance to the mechanism selection is provided as well based on the Cumulative Prospect Theory. Both extensive simulations and realistic experiments with 82 users have been conducted to confirm our theoretical analysis.