Measuring Proof Burden in Public Bounty Listings

Under review. Introduces 'proof burden' as a measurable task-design property and audits proof-of-completion requirements across nearly a thousand public bounty listings, showing that most impose severe worker-exposure requirements and that agent- and bot-labeled requesters disproportionately demand physical-world, location, and monitoring proof.

Authors: Iman YeckehZaare · Venue/status: ACM HCOMP

This submitted manuscript treats proof-of-completion requirements — screenshots, photos, identity, location, recurring monitoring, and financial artifacts — as a measurable worker-exposure layer in public human-computation bounty listings, operationalized through a capped Proof Burden Score with double coding and adjudication. Auditing a large corpus of listings, it finds that most demand severe exposure and that agent- and bot-labeled requesters skew toward physical-world, location, and monitoring proof.

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