VCG-QCP: A Reverse Pricing Mechanism Based on VCG and Quality All-pay for Collaborative Crowdsourcing

With the rapid development of the Internet and combined with outsourcing, a new paradigm – crowdsourcing which shines brilliantly as a new labor mode. However, the existing pricing strategies for crowdsourcing tasks have several undesirable problems, e.g., no universal pricing model, not meeting the multiple requirements of users, pricing rely too much on decision makers, etc., which bring an unreasonable allocation of task rewards so as to make the pricing results subjective and uncontrollable. Therefore, this paper proposes a reverse pricing mechanism based on VCG and quality all-pay for collaborative crowdsourcing (VCG-QCP). The actual crowdsourcing scenario is considered with VCG mechanism, and the concept of quality all-pay is introduced to evaluate the work quality of workers who might perform the task. Then a general reverse pricing model is established by mathematical modeling, and the pricing algorithm is designed based on this model. Simulations show that the proposed method can achieve higher algorithm efficiency, higher task completion quality, a reasonable balance of benefits between employers and workers, and ensuring the truthfulness of workers’ bidding.