Project

Honest Crowds

By State Library of Queensland, Australia [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons

The Honest Crowds project addresses shortcomings of traditional survey techniques in the modern information and big data age. Web survey platforms, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower, bring together millions of surveys and millions of survey participants, which means paying a flat rate for each completed survey may lead to survey responses that lack desirable care and forethought. Rather than allowing survey takers to maximize their reward by completing as many surveys as possible, we demonstrate how strategic incentives can be used to actually reward information and honesty rather than just participation. The incentive structures that we propose provide scalable solutions for the new paradigm of survey and active data collection.