Mitigating Procrastination in Crowdsourcing Via Efficient Scheduling Algorithm

Several works related to crowdsourcing have been proposed in the direction where the task executors are to perform the tasks within the stipulated deadlines. Though the deadlines are set, it may be a practical scenario that majority of the task executors submit the tasks as late as possible. This situation where the task executors may delay their task submission is termed as procrastination in behavioural economics. In many applications, these late submission of tasks may be problematic for task requesters. In literature, how to prevent this procrastination within the deadline is not addressed in crowdsourcing scenario. However, in a bipartite graph setting one procrastination aware scheduling is proposed but balanced job distribution in different slots (also termed as schedules) is not considered there. In this paper, a procrastination aware scheduling of jobs is proliferated by proposing an (randomized) algorithm in crowdsourcing scenario (also applicable in mobile and spatial crowdsourcing). Our algorithm ensures that balancing of jobs in different schedules are maintained. Our scheme is compared with the existing algorithm through extensive simulation and in terms of balancing effect, our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing one. Analytically it is shown that our proposed algorithm maintains the balanced distribution.