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SUMMARY:Crowdsourcing and All-Pay Auctions - Milan Vojnovic\, Microsoft re
 search Cambridge.
DTSTART:20090513T150000Z
DTEND:20090513T160000Z
UID:TALK18260@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Neil Walton
DESCRIPTION:In this talk we present and analyze a model in which users sel
 ect among and subsequently compete in a collection of contests offering va
 rious rewards. The objective is to capture the essential features of a cro
 wdsourcing system\, an environment in which diverse tasks are presented to
  a large community. We aim to demonstrate the precise relationship between
  incentives and participation in such systems.\n\nWe model contests as all
 -pay auctions with incomplete information\; as a consequence of revenue eq
 uivalence\, our model may also be interpreted more broadly as one in which
  users select among auctions of heterogeneous goods. We present two regime
 s in which we find an explicit correspondence in equilibrium between the o
 ffered rewards and the users' participation levels. The regimes respective
 ly model situations in which different contests require similar or unrelat
 ed skills. Principally\, we find that rewards yield logarithmically dimini
 shing returns with respect to participation levels. We compare these resul
 ts to empirical data from the crowdsourcing site Taskcn.com\; we find that
  as we condition the data on more experienced users\, the model more close
 ly conforms to the empirical data.\n\nhttp://research.microsoft.com/apps/p
 ubs/default.aspx?id=79370\n
LOCATION:MR5\, CMS\, Wilberforce Road\, Cambridge\, CB3 0WB
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