This paper shows how job design in‡uences investments and bargaining power during production and examines its implications for the distribution of earnings between management and workers. Without bargaining, the decision to assign each worker to narrowly or broadly de…ned jobs depends on which mode elicits more investments from workers. However, job design makes workers’ investments either subs...

Crowdsourcing platforms support the assignment of jobs to help requesters in their project completion and allow workers to earn money. Most crowdsourcing platforms apply simple schemes in order to filter the tasks a worker can choose from or rely on the workers’ search capabilities. Using genuine task recommendation within such crowdsourcing platforms opens promising opportunities. Such recomme...

In this paper we consider the programming of job rotation in the Assembly Line Worker Assignment and Balancing Problem. The motivation for this study comes from the designing of assembly lines in sheltered work centers for the disabled, where workers have different task execution times. In this context, the well-known training aspects associated with job rotation are particularly desired. We pr...

The assignment and execution of tasks over the Internet is an inexpensive solution in contrast with supercomputers. We consider an Internet-based Master-Worker task computing approach, such as SETI@home. A master process sends tasks, across the Internet, to worker processors. Workers execute, and report back a result. Unfortunately, the disadvantage of this approach is the unreliable nature of ...

Crowdsourcing is a new computing paradigm that harnesses human effort to solve computer-hard problems, such as entity resolution and photo tagging. The crowd (or workers) have diverse qualities and it is important to effectively model a worker’s quality. Most of existing worker models assume that workers have the same quality on different tasks. In practice, however, tasks belong to a variety o...

In traditional assembly lines, it is reasonable to assume that task execution times are the same for each worker. However, in sheltered work centres for disabled this assumption is not valid: some workers may execute some tasks considerably slower or even be incapable of executing them. Worker heterogeneity leads to a problem called the assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem (ALW...

We consider the problem of optimal budget allocation for crowdsourcing problems, allocating users to tasks to maximize our final confidence in the crowdsourced answers. Such an optimized worker assignment method allows us to “boost” the efficacy of any popular crowdsourcing estimation algorithm. We consider a mutual information interpretation of the crowdsourcing problem, which leads to a stoch...

We extend the classic sequential stochastic assignment problem to include arrivals of workers. When workers are all of the same type, we show that the socially optimal policy is the same as the individually optimal policy where workers are given priority according to LCFS. This result also holds under several variants in the model assumptions. When workers have different types, we show that the...

We introduce the problem of Task Assignment and Sequencing (TAS), which adds the timeline perspective to expert crowdsourcing optimization. Expert crowdsourcing involves macrotasks, like document writing, product design, or web development, which take more time than typical binary microtasks, require expert skills, assume varying degrees of knowledge over a topic, and require crowd workers to b...

Crowdsourcing is a new computing paradigm that harnesses human effort to solve computer-hard problems, such as entity resolution and photo tagging. The crowd (or workers) have diverse qualities and it is important to effectively model a worker’s quality. Most of existing worker models assume that workers have the same quality on different tasks. In practice, however, tasks belong to a variety o...