Tasker: Behavioral Insights Via Campus-Based Experimental Mobile Crowd-Sourcing

While mobile crowd-sourcing has become a game-changer for many urban operations, such as last mile logistics and municipal monitoring, we believe that the design of such crowd-sourcing strategies must better accommodate the real-world behavioral preferences and characteristics of users. To provide a real-world testbed to study the impact of novel mobile crowd-sourcing strategies, we have designed, developed and experimented with a real-world mobile crowd-tasking platform on the SMU campus, called TA$Ker. We enhanced the TA$Ker platform to support several new features (e.g., task bundling, differential pricing and cheating analytics) and experimentally investigated these features via a two-month deployment of TA$Ker, involving 900 real users on the SMU campus who performed over 30,000 tasks. Our studies (i) show the benefits of bundling tasks as a combined package, (ii) reveal the effectiveness of differential pricing strategies and (iii) illustrate key aspects of cheating (false reporting) behavior observed among workers.