Beyond Monetary Incentives: Experiments in Paid Microtask Contests

In this article, we aim to gain a better understanding into how paid microtask crowdsourcing could leverage its appeal and scaling power by using contests to boost crowd performance and engagement. We introduce our microtask-based annotation platform Wordsmith, which features incentives such as points, leaderboards, and badges on top of financial remuneration. Our analysis focuses on a particular type of incentive, contests, as a means to apply crowdsourcing in near-real-time scenarios, in which requesters need labels quickly. We model crowdsourcing contests as a continuous-time Markov chain with the objective to maximise the output of the crowd workers, while varying a parameter that determines whether a worker is eligible for a reward based on their present rank on the leaderboard. We conduct empirical experiments in which crowd workers recruited from CrowdFlower carry out annotation microtasks on Wordsmith—in our case, to identify named entities in a stream of Twitter posts. In the experimental conditions, we test different reward spreads and record the total number of annotations received. We compare the results against a control condition in which the same annotation task was completed on CrowdFlower without a time or contest constraint. The experiments show that rewarding only the best contributors in a live contest could be a viable model to deliver results faster, though quality might suffer for particular types of annotation tasks. Increasing the reward spread leads to more work being completed, especially by the top contestants. Overall, the experiments shed light on possible design improvements of paid microtasks platforms to boost task performance and speed and make the overall experience more fair and interesting for crowd workers.