Abstract. Information systems are becoming ever more reliant on different forms of social computing, employing individuals, crowds or assembled teams of professionals. With humans as first-class elements, the success of such systems depends heavily on how well we can motivate people to act in a planned fashion. Incentives are an important part of human resource management, manifesting selective and motivating effects. However, support for defining and executing incentives in today’s information systems is underdeveloped, often being limited to simple, per-task cash rewards. Furthermore, no systematic approach to program incentive functionalities for this type of platforms exists.

In this paper we present fundamental elements of a framework for programmable incentive management in information systems. These elements form the basis necessary to support modeling, programming, and execution of various incentive mechanisms. They can be integrated with different underlying systems, promoting portability and reuse of proven incentive strategies. We carry out a functional design evaluation by illustrating modeling and composing capabilities of a prototype implementation on realistic incentive scenarios.

Keywords: rewards, incentives, social computing, crowdsourcing.

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38709-8_44

Citation: Ognjen Scekic, Hong-Linh Truong, Schahram Dustdar, “Programming Incentives in Information Systems”, 25th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering(CAiSE’13), Springer-Verlag, Valencia, Spain, 17-21 June, 2013.

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Abstract. Conventional incentive mechanisms were designed for business environments involving static business processes and a limited number of actors. They are not easily applicable to crowdsourcing and other social computing platforms, characterized by dynamic collaboration patterns and high numbers of actors, because the effects of incentives in these environments are often unforeseen and more costly than in a well-controlled environment of a traditional company.

In this paper we investigate how to design and calibrate incentive schemes for crowdsourcing processes by simulating joint effects of a combination of different participation and incentive mechanisms applied to a working crowd. More specifically, we present a simulation model of incentive schemes and evaluate it on a relevant real-world scenario. We show how the model is used to simulate different compositions of incentive mechanisms and model parameters, and how these choices influence the costs on the system provider side and the number of malicious workers.

Keywords: rewards, incentives, crowdsourcing, social computing, collective adaptive systems.

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41030-7_11

Citation: Ognjen Scekic, Christoph Dorn, Schahram Dustdar, “Simulation-Based Modeling and Evaluation of Incentive Schemes in Crowdsourcing Environments”, 21st International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS’13), September 11-13, 2013, Graz, Austria.

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Introduction. Incentives and rewards help align the interests of employees and organizations. They first appeared with the division of labor and have since followed the increasing complexity of human labor and organizations. As a single incentive measure always targets a specific behavior and sometimes additionally induces unwanted responses from workers, multiple incentives are usually combined to counteract the dysfunctional behavior and produce  desired results. Numerous studies have shown the effectiveness of different incentive mechanisms and their selective and motivational effects. Their importance is reflected in the fact that most big and mid-size companies employ some kind of incentive measures.

Expansion of social computing will include not only better exploitation of crowdsourcing but also solutions that extend traditional business processes; increasing research interest seems to confirm the trend. Several frameworks aiming to support such new collaboration models are being developed (such as socially enhanced computing). These new forms of social computing are intended to support greater task complexity, more intelligent task division, complex organizational and managerial structures for virtual teams, and virtual “careers.” With envisioned changes, incentives will also gain importance and complexity to address workers’ dysfunctional behavior. This new emphasis calls for automated ways of handling incentives and rewards. However, the social computing market is dominated by flat and short-lived organizational structures, employing a limited number of simple incentive mechanisms. That is why we view the state of the social computing market as an opportunity to add novel ways of handling incentives and rewards.

Here, we analyze incentive mechanisms and suggest how they can be used for next-generation social computing. We start with a classification of incentive mechanisms in the literature and in traditional business organizations, then identify elements that can be used as building blocks for any composite incentive mechanism and show the same elements are also used in social computing, even though the resulting schemes lack the complexity needed to support advanced business processes; we conclude with our vision
for future developments.

doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2461256.2461275

Citation: Ognjen Scekic, Hong-Linh Truong, Schahram Dustdar, “Incentives and Rewarding in Social Computing”, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 65, No. 6, pp. 72-82.

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