Computer Engineering Commons^™

Network Economics-Based Crowdsourcing In Online Social Networks, Natasha S. Kubiak

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

This thesis addresses the challenge of user recruitment by various competing marketing agencies (MAs) in Online Social Networks. A labor economics approach, following the principles of contract theory, is devised to enable MAs to reveal the potential of each participating user to contribute a personalized level of quality and quantity of information to the crowdsourcing process. The MAs objective is to maximize their personal benefit, i.e., total utility obtained, given its budget. The latter optimization problem is formulated as a Generalized Colonel Blotto (GCB) game among the MAs, where each MA aims at incentivizing each user to report its information. …