In an effort to better understand how information spreads across a population, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency challenged teams of researchers to find the coordinates of 10 red weather balloons distributed across the continental United States. If the winning team's findings are any indication, incentives can play a vital role in crowd engagement.

In the event of a national emergency, it could be difficult to stand up a network quickly, or network services could be down; as such, DARPA sought alternatives for spreading information quickly, toward a common goal.

A team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers won the challenge, finding all 10 balloons in less than 9 hours. The team's findings are published in the most recent issue of Science.

The MIT team encouraged cascades of participants by motivating people to spread the news about the balloon challenge. The team promised $2,000 to the first respondent with the correct coordinates for a single balloon, $1,000 to the person who invited that balloon identifier, $500 to the person who invited the inviter, and so on.

"Providing appropriate incentives is a key challenge in social mobilization," say report authors. Incentives must be large enough to catch an individual's attention and make it worth his while to share with his network via tools--such as Twitter, Facebook and email.

 "The mechanism's success can be attributed to its ability to provide incentives for individuals to both reports on found balloon locations while simultaneously participating in the dissemination of information about the cause," write report authors.

"In practice, it is unlikely for an unprepared individual to find other balloons," adds the MIT team, so recruiting more individuals is beneficial for those seeking the incentive.  

Researchers note that this strategy could be replicated in several different contexts, such as "social mobilization to fight world hunger [and] in games of cooperation and prediction," they say.

For more:
- download the article from Science (reg. req.)

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