Figure 1. Locations in the DaRPa Red Balloon Challenge.

Figure 2. example recursive incentive-structure process for the mit team.

Alice wins $750

Bob wins $500

Carol wins $1,000

Dave wins $2,000

ALICE $250 $500

BOB $500

$1,000

CAROL $1,000

$2,000

Another balloon found!

dAvE $2,000

Balloon found!

 

Chapel Hill) finished tenth by locating six balloons.

Two months later, at the Comput-
er-Supported Cooperative Work Con-
ference ( http://www.cscw2010.org/)
in Savannah, GA, a special session
dedicated to lessons learned from the
Challenge brought together represen-
tatives from the winning MIT team,
the GTRI team, and the iSchools team
to compare and contrast among the
strategies and experiences across the
teams. There, members of the MIT
and iSchools teams reflected on their
strategies, how they validated their
balloon sightings, and the role of so-
cial networking tools in their process.
While the GTRI team was unavailable
for this article, we report on what they
shared at the CSCW session and pub-
lished elsewhere. 6, 11, 12

mit team

The MIT team learned about the Chal-
lenge only a few days before the bal-
loons were deployed and developed a
strategy that emphasized both speed
(in terms of number of people recruit-
ed) and breadth (covering as much U.S.
geography as possible). They set up a
platform for viral collaboration that
used recursive incentives to align the
public’s interest with the goal of win-
ning the Challenge. This approach was
inspired by the work of Peter S. Dodds
et al. 5 that found that success in us-
ing social networks to tackle widely
distributed search problems depends
on individual incentives. The work of
Mason and Watts7 also informed the
use of financial incentives to motivate
crowdsourcing productivity.