March 22, 2019: Invited Speaker Seminar: Coalitions, Fair Reward-Division,and Crowdworkers

Dr. Kate Larson
University of Waterloo

Friday, March 22, 2019 at 11:00 am
Room EV003.309

Abstract

Group-based crowdsourcing allows crowd workers to solve problems that they could not handle alone, but financial incentives for this type of work are not well understood. While cooperative game theory provides normative models for describing fair and stable reward divisions for groups, there has been limited empirical studies comparing these normative models with what people may prefer.

In this talk, I will discuss a study where we investigated how humans divide group-rewards when acting as impartial decision-makers in cooperative games, and show that people consistently violate several of the axioms that characterize theoretically fair reward divisions. Based on our results, we propose and evaluate descriptive models for human decision making with respect to group reward division, and discuss some of the impact these results have on group-based crowdwork.

Biography

Kate Larson is a Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. Her research interests include artificial intelligence and multiagent systems with a particular focus on algorithmic game theory, group decision making, and preference modelling. She holds the Pasupalak AI Fellowship at the University of Waterloo, was a Cheriton Faculty Fellow (2012-2015), and was awarded the Canadian Association of Computer Science Outstanding Young Researcher Award. She likes organizing groups of agents and so is the Past-President of the International Foundation for Agents and Multiagent Systems, as the General Co-Chair of the 2017 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2017), and previously served as an AAAI Councilor.