FaRM: Fair Reward Mechanism for Information Aggregation in Spontaneous Localized Settings (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper introduces FaRM, a fair reward mechanism for local information aggregation that ensures equitable treatment of honest agents and discourages dishonest behavior in spontaneous settings.

Contribution

FaRM is a novel Nash incentive mechanism that incorporates multiple scoring metrics to promote fairness and robustness in local information crowdsourcing.

Findings

FaRM effectively distinguishes honest from dishonest agents.

It ensures fair rewards based on multiple reliability metrics.

The mechanism is robust against collusion and false participation.

Abstract

Although peer prediction markets are widely used in crowdsourcing to aggregate information from agents, they often fail to reward the participating agents equitably. Honest agents can be wrongly penalized if randomly paired with dishonest ones. In this work, we introduce \emph{selective} and \emph{cumulative} fairness. We characterize a mechanism as fair if it satisfies both notions and present FaRM, a representative mechanism we designed. FaRM is a Nash incentive mechanism that focuses on information aggregation for spontaneous local activities which are accessible to a limited number of agents without assuming any prior knowledge of the event. All the agents in the vicinity observe the same information. FaRM uses \textit{(i)} a \emph{report strength score} to remove the risk of random pairing with dishonest reporters, \textit{(ii)} a \emph{consistency score} to measure an agent's history of accurate reports and distinguish valuable reports, \textit{(iii)} a \emph{reliability score} to estimate the probability of an agent to collude with nearby agents and prevents agents from getting swayed, and \textit{(iv)} a \emph{location robustness score} to filter agents who try to participate without being present in the considered setting. Together, report strength, consistency, and reliability represent a fair reward given to agents based on their reports.