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A deterministic MAB mechanism for crowdsourcing with logarithmic regret and immediate payments
S. Jain, , S. Bhat, S. Gujar, Y. Narahari
Published in International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
2016
Pages: 86 - 94
Abstract
We consider a general crowdsourcing setting with strategic workers whose qualities are unknown and design a multi-armed bandit (MAB) mechanism, CrowdUCB, which is deterministic, regret minimizing, and offers immediate payments to the workers. The problem involves sequentially selecting workers to process tasks in order to maximize the social welfare while learning the qualities of the strategic workers (strategic about their costs). Existing MAB mechanisms are either: (a) deterministic which potentially cause significant loss in social welfare, or (b) randomized which typically lead to high variance in payments. CrowdUCB completely addresses the above problems with the following features: (i) offers deterministic payments, (ii) achieves logarithmic regret in social welfare, (iii) renders allocations more effective by allocating blocks of tasks to a worker instead of a single task, and (iv) offers payment to a worker immediately upon completion of an assigned block of tasks. CrowdUCB is a mechanism with learning that learns the qualities of the workers while eliciting their true costs, irrespective of whether or not the workers know their own qualities. We show that CrowdUCB is ex-post individually rational (EPIR) and ex-post incentive compatible (EPIC) when the workers do not know their own qualities and when they update their beliefs in sync with the requester. When the workers know their own qualities, CrowdUCB is EPIR and ϵ-EPIC where ϵ is sub-linear in terms of the number of tasks. Copyright © 2016, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.
About the journal
JournalProceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
PublisherInternational Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
ISSN15488403