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A network based mechanism for managing decomposable tasks via crowdsourcing

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Abstract

If a task is decomposable in a competitive crowdsourcing environment, thereby allowing collaboration, rational workers may choose to divide it into multiple sub-tasks among themselves. But as the winners are selected independently, there is no benefit out of this decomposition. We show that by the appropriate combination of such decomposed solutions, obtained from multiple workers, we can achieve a better solution for a given task. We present a network based mechanism to choose the best mixture of sub-tasks in a competitive environment for selecting collaborating winners.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable suggestions that greatly helped to improve the presentation of this paper. This publication is an outcome of the R&D work undertaken in the project under the Visvesvaraya Ph.D. Scheme of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India, being implemented by Digital India Corporation (formerly Media Lab Asia).

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  1. Department of Information Technology, Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur, Howrah, 711103, India

    Sankar Kumar Mridha & Malay Bhattacharyya

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  1. Sankar Kumar Mridha
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  2. Malay Bhattacharyya
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Correspondence to Malay Bhattacharyya.

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Mridha, S.K., Bhattacharyya, M. A network based mechanism for managing decomposable tasks via crowdsourcing. Electron Commer Res 18, 869–881 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-018-9317-8

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