Supporting Multilevel Incentive Mechanisms In Crowdsourcing Systems: An Artifact-Centric View

Crowdsourcing systems of the future (e.g., Social ComputeUnits-SCUs, collective adaptive systems) need to support complex collaborative processes, such as software development. This presupposes deploying ad-hoc assembled teams of human and machine services that actively collaborate and communicate among each other, exchanging different artifacts and jointly processing them. Major challenges in such environments (e.g., team formation, adaptability, runtime management of data-flow and collaboration patterns) can be somewhat alleviated by delegating the responsibility and the know-how needed for these duties to the participating crowd members, while indirectly controlling and stimulating them through appropriate incentive mechanisms. Existing process-centric collaboration modeling approaches (e.g., workflows) are incapable of encoding such incentive mechanisms. Therefore, in this paper we analyze different interaction aspects that incentive mechanisms cover and formulate them as requirements for future systems to support. We then propose an artifact-centric approach for modeling incentives in rich crowdsourcing environments that meets these requirements.