CSE518A Assignment 1 Report

SAYANTAN KUMAR
September 2019

1 Question 1
The screenshots of the tasks has been attached to the report. I have taken
screenshots of the messages ”Your HIT has been successfully submitted” which
was displayed after completing the task. The reward assigned for the task can
be seen on the top right corner.

After submitting a particular task worth 0.05 USD, a message was displayed
”There was no more of these HITs available for this task” without mentioning
the reward amount. Since I have completed the task I have attached that
screenshot with this report as well.

2 Question 2
I have completed 4 tasks worth 0.03 USD in an average time of 7 minutes, 1
task worth 0.05 USD in 18 minutes and 2 tasks worth 0.05 USD in an average
time of 13 minutes. Therefore total time taken by me is 7 ∗ 4 + 18 + 13 ∗ 2 =
28 + 18 + 26 = 72 minutes. Total rewards earned by me in doing the tasks =
0.03 ∗ 4 + 0.08 + 0.05 ∗ 2 = 0.30 USD.

Since I have earned 0.3 USD in 72 minutes, amount earned in 60 minutes =

0.3
72 ∗ 60 = 0.25 USD. Hence my hourly wage as a crowd worker is 0.25 USD.

3 Question 3
3.1 Part a
One of the tasks which I did involved summarizing a passage into a single sen-
tence or a short phrase. In a forum, a pregnant woman had listed her symptoms
about her pregnancy and the medicines she had been taking. She wanted to eat
a take a particular pill but was unsure of its effects on her pregnancy. Through
the post, the woman had wanted someone to help her who had similar experi-
ences.

1
3.2 Part b
By asking the workers to summarize the post in a short phrase/sentence the
requester was probably aiming to group the huge number of posts in the forum
into certain categories. Someone who opens the forum wants to follow the dis-
cussion or wishing to answer questions can quickly look the the title of the posts
(the summary) without having to read the entire post. This would probably
help them to choose what kind of posts they wish to see and answer, saving a
lot of time.

3.3 Part c
The task can be analyzed by 2 perspectives : monetary and quality. I feel the
reward is far too less ( 0.03 USD) for a task where the worker has to read a long
passage and then use their writing skills to summarize the whole paragraph into
a short yet meaningful sentence. However, if someone does this work not for
earning rewards and purely out of interests, he or she might like the idea of the
task.

One way to make the task more fair to the workers is to make the amount
of reward assigned directly proportional to the size of the post that needs to
be summarized i.e longer post should have more rewards assigned. Also the
requester should provide bonus rewards for quality summaries where the worker
has invested a fair bit of time and effort. This should encourage people attempt-
ing the task to take it more seriously and produce quality work.

4 Question 4
A few issues that the workers face in Amazon Mechanical Turk or Figure Eight
is the lack of sufficient tasks when they have just started. The tasks which are
available are either too boring/trivial or have very low rewards. One thing that
the platform should do is to assign tasks to workers based on their preferences.
In a survey collected from all workers during registration they should be asked
what kind of tasks do they prefer, tasks which are trivial with low rewards or
ones which are more difficult but with high rewards.

There are 3 types of workers found in these platforms, potential spammers,

ones who usually give correct answers but not their best effort always and those
who always produce their best performance by investing time and effort. To
maximize the numbers in 3rd category and minimize the spammers, the above
suggested method can be useful. The platform should also moderate the tasks
uploaded by the requester to ensure that each task is assigned a sufficient reward
based on its difficulty. The ultimate goal is design a system that is fair to both
the worker and the requester.