Managing Innovation in a Crowd

34 Pages Posted: 2 Feb 2014 Last revised: 31 Mar 2023

See all articles by Daron Acemoglu

Daron Acemoglu

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Department of Economics; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Mohamed Mostagir

University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business

Asuman E. Ozdaglar

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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Date Written: January 2014

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is an emerging technology where innovation and production are sourced out to the public through an open call. At the center of crowdsourcing is a resource allocation problem: there is an abundance of workers but a scarcity of high skills, and an easy task assigned to a high-skill worker is a waste of resources. This problem is complicated by the fact that the exact difficulties of innovation tasks may not be known in advance, so tasks that require high-skill labor cannot be identified and allocated ahead of time. We show that the solution to this problem takes the form of a skill hierarchy, where tasks are first attempted by low-skill labor, and high-skill workers only engage with a task if less skilled workers are unable to finish it. This hierarchy can be constructed and implemented in a decentralized manner even though neither the difficulties of the tasks nor the skills of the candidate workers are known. We provide a dynamic pricing mechanism that achieves this implementation by inducing workers to self select into different layers. The mechanism is simple: each time a task is attempted and not finished, its price (reward upon completion) goes up.

Suggested Citation

Acemoglu, Daron and Mostagir, Mohamed and Ozdaglar, Asuman E., Managing Innovation in a Crowd (January 2014). NBER Working Paper No. w19852, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2389481

Daron Acemoglu (Contact Author)

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Mohamed Mostagir

University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business ( email )

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Asuman E. Ozdaglar

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science ( email )

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