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Optimal Crowdsourcing Contests

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Encyclopedia of Algorithms

Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

2012; Chawla, Hartline, Sivan

Problem Definition

With the ever-increasing reach of the Internet, crowdsourcing contests have become an increasingly convenient alternative for completing tasks, compared to traditional hire-and-pay methods. There are several websites dedicated to providing users a platform for creating their own crowdsourcing contests. For instance, Taskcn.com allows users to post tasks, collect submissions from registered users, and provide a monetary reward to the best submission. The reach of crowdsourcing is far beyond tedious/labor-intensive tasks. Netflix, for instance, issued a million-dollar contest for developing a collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, instead of hiring an in-house research team to develop this. The Indian Government used a crowdsourcing contest to pick a new symbol for its rupee currency.

The Questions

In designing a crowdsourcing contest, a principal, with a...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Redmond,WA, USA

    Balasubramanian Sivan

Authors
  1. Balasubramanian Sivan
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Correspondence to Balasubramanian Sivan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA

    Ming-Yang Kao

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Sivan, B. (2014). Optimal Crowdsourcing Contests. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27848-8_757-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27848-8_757-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27848-8

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