Boomerang: Rebounding the Consequences of Reputation Feedback on Crowdsourcing Platforms

Snehalkumar (Neil) S. Gaikwad, Durim Morina, Adam Ginzberg, Catherine Mullings, Shirish Goyal, Dilrukshi Gamage, Christopher Diemert, Mathias Burton, Sharon Zhou, Mark Whiting, Karolina Ziulkoski, Alipta Ballav, Aaron Gilbee, Senadhipathige S. Niranga, Vibhor Sehgal, Jasmine Lin, Leonardy Kristianto, Angela Richmond-Fuller, Jeff Regino, Nalin Chhibber, Dinesh Majeti, Sachin Sharma, Kamila Mananova, Dinesh Dhakal, William Dai, Victoria Purynova, Samarth Sandeep, Varshine Chandrakanthan, Tejas Sarma, Sekandar Matin, Ahmed Nasser, Rohit Nistala, Alexander Stolzoff, Kristy Milland, Vinayak Mathur, Rajan Vaish, Michael S. Bernstein
UIST: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software Technology, 2016
Paid crowdsourcing platforms suffer from low-quality work and unfair rejections, but paradoxically, most workers and requesters have high reputation scores. These inflated scores, which make high-quality work and workers difficult to find, stem from social pressure to avoid giving negative feedback. We introduce Boomerang, a reputation system for crowdsourc- ing platforms that elicits more accurate feedback by rebound- ing the consequences of feedback directly back onto the person who gave it. With Boomerang, requesters find that their highly- rated workers gain earliest access to their future tasks, and workers find tasks from their highly-rated requesters at the top of their task feed. Field experiments verify that Boomerang causes both workers and requesters to provide feedback that is more closely aligned with their private opinions. Inspired by a game-theoretic notion of incentive-compatibility, Boomerang opens opportunities for interaction design to incentivize honest reporting over strategic dishonesty.

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