Pricing Crowdsourcing Services

This paper studies optimal fee schedules of crowd-sourcing services. The paper finds that service fees should be an increasing concave function of task prizes. This result implies that optimal service fee rates, measured as the ratios of fees to prizes, decrease with task prizes. The paper shows that low-type crowdsourcing contest sponsors might be priced out of the market under the optimal fee schedule. The paper also finds that crowdsourcing websites should charge higher service fees for hosting consumer-contest type crowdsourcing contests than for research-tournament type crowdsourcing contests.