A Markov Decision Process Framework for Predictable Job Completion Times on Crowdsourcing Platforms∗

Task starvation leads to huge variation in the completion times of the tasks posted on to the crowd. The price offered to a given task together with the dynamics of the crowd at the time of posting affect its completion time. Large organiza-tions/requesters who frequent the crowd at regular intervals in order to get their tasks done desire predictability in com-pletion times of the tasks. Thus, such requesters have to take into account the crowd dynamics at the time of posting the tasks and price them accordingly. In this work, we study an instance of the pricing problem and propose a solution based on the framework of Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In the what follows we describe the problem and the proposed solution in brief. Problem Setting We consider the problem of posting CAPTCHA tasks o