Quantifying Spatial Under-reporting Disparities in Resident Crowdsourcing
This addresses the issue of inequitable government service efficiency due to heterogeneous reporting delays in crowdsourced incident reports, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for delay estimation.
The paper tackled the problem of spatial under-reporting disparities in resident crowdsourcing for city governance by developing a method to identify reporting delays without external ground-truth data, finding substantial disparities in New York City and Chicago with over 100,000 and 900,000 reports analyzed, respectively.
Modern city governance relies heavily on crowdsourcing to identify problems such as downed trees and power lines. A major concern is that residents do not report problems at the same rates, with heterogeneous reporting delays directly translating to downstream disparities in how quickly incidents can be addressed. Here we develop a method to identify reporting delays without using external ground-truth data. Our insight is that the rates at which duplicate reports are made about the same incident can be leveraged to disambiguate whether an incident has occurred by investigating its reporting rate once it has occurred. We apply our method to over 100,000 resident reports made in New York City and to over 900,000 reports made in Chicago, finding that there are substantial spatial and socioeconomic disparities in how quickly incidents are reported. We further validate our methods using external data and demonstrate how estimating reporting delays leads to practical insights and interventions for a more equitable, efficient government service.