Crowdsourcing rife with malicious behaviour

Crowdsourcing appears to encourage malicious behaviour, even when it’s in everybody’s best interests to cooperate, according to joint Australia-UK research.

The research from NICTA and the UK’s University of Southampton suggests that one of the key strengths of crowdsourcing as a problem-solving method - its openness of entry - can also be a significant weakness.

Analysis of a number of recent crowdsourcing competitions uncovered a host of malicious behaviour, such as sabotaging progress or submitting misinformation, said Dr Victor Naroditskiy, the report’s co-author.

“Everyone from the ‘crowd’ can contribute to solving the task. This is exactly what makes crowdsourcing so powerful for solving tasks that are all but impossible for a closed group of individuals or an organisation,” he said.

“At the same time, the openness makes crowdsourcing solutions vulnerable to malicious behaviour of other interested parties.”

These problems are common in many crowdsourcing scenarios but come to a head in a competition scenario where a single winner takes the main prize, Naroditskiy said.

The competitions were analysed based on the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ - the thought experiment that demonstrates why two rational people may not cooperate even when it is in each of their best interests to do so.

The research also shows that making attacks more expensive for the attacker does little to deter malicious behaviour.

Image courtesy of James Cridland under CC