This paper investigates the incentive mechanism design from a novel and practically important perspective in which mobile users as contributors do not join simultaneously and a requester desires large efforts from early contributors. A two-stage Tullock contest framework is constructed:at the second stage the potential contributors compete for splittable reward by exerting efforts, and at the first stage the requester can orchestrate the incentive mechanism to maximize his crowdsensing efficiency given the rewarding budget. A general reward discrimination mechanism is developed for timeliness sensitive crowdsensing where an earlier contributor usually has a larger maximum achievable reward and thus allocates more efforts. Owning to the lack of joining time information, two practical implementations, namely earliest-n and termination time, are announced to the contributors. For each of them, we formulate a Stackelberg Bayesian game in which the joining time of a contributor is his type and not available to his opponents. The uniqueness of Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) is proved in each strategy. To maximize the requester's efficiency, we compute the optimal number of rewarded contributors in the earliest-n scheme and the optimal deadline in the termination time scheme. Our contest framework is applicable not only to the closed crowdsensing with fixed number of contributors, but also to the open crowdsensing that the arrival of contributors is governed by a stochastic process. Extensive simulations manifest that with appropriate reward discriminations, the requester is able to achieve a much higher efficiency with the optimal selection of the number of rewarded contributiors and the termination time.
Authors in @cite_0 studied the question of designing incentives for online Q &A forums. Ghosh and McAfee modeled the economics of incentivizing high-quality user generated content using noncooperative game, and investigated the highest quality at the NE under an elimination mechanism @cite_10 . @cite_1 studied a platform-centric incentive mechanism for maximizing the total effort from contributors in mobile crowdsensing that utilizes a Stackelberg game framework. Authors in @cite_16 presented an optimal Tullock contest model for crowdsensing with incomplete information.
@cite_0 @cite_1 @cite_16 @cite_10
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Incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing have been extensively studied under the framework of all-pay auctions. Along a distinct line, this paper proposes to use Tullock contests as an alternative tool to design incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing. We are inspired by the conduciveness of Tullock contests to attracting user entry (yet not necessarily a higher revenue) in other domains. In this paper, we explore a new dimension in optimal Tullock contest design, by superseding the contest prize — which is fixed in conventional Tullock contests — with a prize function that is dependent on the (unknown) winner's contribution, in order to maximize the crowdsourcer's utility. We show that this approach leads to attractive practical advantages: (a) it is well-suited for rapid prototyping in fully distributed web agents and smartphone apps; (b) it overcomes the disincentive to participate caused by players' antagonism to an increasing number of rivals. Furthermore, we optimize conventional, fixed-prize Tullock contests to construct the most superior benchmark to compare against our mechanism. Through extensive evaluations, we show that our mechanism significantly outperforms the optimal benchmark, by over three folds on the crowdsourcer's utility cum profit and up to nine folds on the players' social welfare. In crowdsensing, appropriate rewards are always expected to compensate the participants for their consumptions of physical resources and involvements of manual efforts. While continuous low quality sensing data could do harm to the availability and preciseness of crowdsensing based services, few existing incentive mechanisms have ever addressed the issue of sensing data's quality. The design of quality based incentive mechanism is motivated by its potential to avoid inefficient sensing and unnecessary rewards. In this paper, we incorporate the consideration of data quality into the design of incentive mechanism for crowdsensing, and propose to pay the participants as how well they do, to motivate the rational participants to perform data sensing efficiently. This mechanism estimates the quality of sensing data, and offers each participant a reward based on her effective contribution. We also implement the mechanism and evaluate the improvements in terms of quality of service and profit of service provider. The evaluation results show that our mechanism achieves superior performance when compared to the uniform pricing scheme. In this paper we present and analyze a model in which users select among, and subsequently compete in, a collection of contests offering various rewards. The objective is to capture the essential features of a crowdsourcing system, an environment in which diverse tasks are presented to a large community. We aim to demonstrate the precise relationship between incentives and participation in such systems. We model contests as all-pay auctions with incomplete information; as a consequence of revenue equivalence, our model may also be interpreted more broadly as one in which users select among auctions of heterogeneous goods. We present two regimes in which we find an explicit correspondence in equilibrium between the offered rewards and the users' participation levels. The regimes respectively model situations in which different contests require similar or unrelated skills. Principally, we find that rewards yield logarithmically diminishing returns with respect to participation levels. We compare these results to empirical data from the crowdsourcing site Taskcn.com; we find that as we condition the data on more experienced users, the model more closely conforms to the empirical data. In this paper, we provide a simple game-theoretic model of an online question and answer forum. We focus on factual questions in which user responses aggregate while a question remains open. Each user has a unique piece of information and can decide when to report this information. The asker prefers to receive information sooner rather than later, and will stop the process when satisfied with the cumulative value of the posted information. We consider two distinct cases: a complements case, in which each successive piece of information is worth more to the asker than the previous one; and a substitutes case, in which each successive piece of information is worth less than the previous one. A best-answer scoring rule is adopted to model Yahoo! Answers, and is effective for substitutes information, where it isolates an equilibrium in which all users respond in the first round. But we find that this rule is ineffective for complements information, isolating instead an equilibrium in which all users respond in the final round. In addressing this, we demonstrate that an approval-voting scoring rule and a proportional-share scoring rule can enable the most efficient equilibrium with complements information, under certain conditions, by providing incentives for early responders as well as the user who submits the final answer.