Paid Crowdsourcing, Low Income Contributors, and Subjectivity

Abstract

Scientific projects that require human computation often resort to crowdsourcing. Interested individuals can contribute to a crowdsourcing task, essentially contributing towards the project’s goals. To motivate participation and engagement, scientists use a variety of reward mechanisms. The most common motivation, and the one that yields the fastest results, is monetary rewards. By using monetary, scientists address a wider audience to participate in the task. As the payment is below minimum wage for developed economies, users from developing countries are more eager to participate. In subjective tasks, or tasks that cannot be validated through a right or wrong type of validation, monetary incentives could contrast with the much needed quality of submissions. We perform a subjective crowdsourcing task, emotion annotation, and compare the quality of the answers from contributors of varying income levels, based on the Gross Domestic Product. The results indicate a different contribution process between contributors from varying GDP regions. Low income contributors, possibly driven by the monetary incentive, submit low quality answers at a higher pace, while high income contributors provide diverse answers at a slower pace.