Using Visibility to Control Collective Attention in Crowdsourcing

Online crowdsourcing provides new opportunities for ordinary people to create original content. This has led to a rapidly growing volume of user-generated content, and consequently a challenge to readily identify high quality items. Due to people’s limited attention, the presentation of content strongly affects how people al- locate effort to the available content. We evaluate this effect experimentally using Amazon Mechanical Turk and show that it is possible to manipulate attention to accomplish desired goals.