Winner-Take-All Crowdsourcing Contests with Stochastic Production

2013-11-10

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, 1

Volume

Vol. 1 (2013): First AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing

Full Papers

We study winner-take-all contests for crowdsourcing procurement in a model of costly effort and stochastic production. The principal announces a prize value P, agents simultaneously select a level of costly effort to exert towards production, yielding stochastic quality results, and then the agent who produces the highest quality good is paid P by the principal. We derive conditions on the probabilistic mapping from effort to quality under which this contest paradigm yields efficient equilibrium outcomes, and demonstrate that the conditions are satisfied in a range of canonical settings.

10.1609/hcomp.v1i1.13090