Exploitation and Confrontation: Sustainability Analysis of Crowdsourcing

Game theory is an effective analytical tool for crowdsourcing. Existing studies based on it share a commonality: the influence of players’ decisions is bilateral . However, the status is broken by the zero-determinant (ZD) strategy, where the ZD player can unilaterally control the opponent's expected payoff. Thereby, crowdsourcing games trigger conclusions that differ from traditional ones. By addressing three questions, this paper is the first work to analyze the turbulence in crowdsourcing caused by the inequality between the requestor and the worker in the ZD game. The first question reveals the potential for the requestor to exploit the worker; the second question quantifies the worker's tolerance towards exploitation, providing a basis for confrontation; the third question serves as the cornerstone for maintaining the crowdsourcing, regulating the requestor's exploitative behavior. To answer these questions, we extend ZD strategies from binary games to continuous ones, not only revealing the requestor's dominance but also enriching the theoretical system of ZD strategies and broadening their application. Furthermore, we introduce the worker's dissatisfaction degree, identifying the exponential trend and decay rate, revealing optimal timing and speed for the worker's effective confrontation and maximum exploitation for the requestor. Numerical simulations have validated the effectiveness of our analyses.