Aug. 31st, Yan Chen, Ph.D. – Crowdsourcing with All-pay Auctions:  a Field Experiment on Taskcn

Abstract:To understand the effects of incentives on crowdsourcing participation and submission quality, we conduct a field experiment on Taskcn, a large Chinese crowdsourcing site using all-pay auction mechanisms. We systematically vary the size of the reward, and the presence of a soft reserve in the form of the early entry of a high-quality submission. We find that a higher reward induces significantly more submissions and attracts higher quality users. However, unpredicted by theory, we find that high-quality users are significantly less likely to enter tasks where a high quality solution has already been submitted, resulting in lower quality in subsequent submissions in such soft reserve treatments.

Dr. Yan Chen, a guest of the IFREE/ESI Lecture SeriesBio: Chen’s research focuses on mechanism design and experimental economics. The fundamental challenge Chen addresses in her research is the design of robust mechanisms when the agents involved are not perfectly rational.  In meeting this challenge, she applies experimental, computational, and theoretical approaches to incorporate dynamic learning theories from economics and cognitive psychology into the static mechanism design framework.

In other work she synthesizes economic and social psychology theories to understand the effects of social identity in economic decision making, and to develop approaches to increasing member contributions in online communities. She also investigates efficient and fair mechanisms for allocating indivisible resources.

Chen has published in leading economic journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Public Economics, and Games and Economic Behavior. She has also published in prestigious conference proceedings (refereed) in computer science, such as CHI and WSDM.  She serves as an associate editor of Management Science, and an associate editor of Experimental Economics.

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