The Role of Super Agents in Mobile Crowdsourcing

The ubiquity of smartphones have led to the emergence of mobile crowdsourcing markets, where several tens of thousands of smartphone users participate to perform tasks in the physical world. Mobile crowdsourcing platforms are uniquely different from their online counterparts in that they cater to smartphone users, require spatial mobility, and have tasks that involve more data collection and less human computation. Despite the emergence and importance of such mobile marketplaces, little to none is known about their dynamics. This paper provides an in-depth exploration of several aspects of mobile crowdsourcing markets based on a year-long dataset from a leading mobile platform. We find that like online crowdsourcing markets, a small core group of workers account for a disproportionately large proportion of activity generated in the market. We find that these super agents are highly efficient, working on tasks more quickly and picking fewer lowly priced tasks. We discover that while all agents chain several tasks into one session, hence potentially amortizing travel costs, super agents are 3× more likely to chain tasks. Unlike online crowdsourcing markets, we find a skew towards more males, an even younger population, and higher education levels.