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.
There is a growing literature on the optimal design of incentive mechanism in crowdsourcing and mobile crowdsensing applications. For instance, @cite_0 @cite_10 targeted at incentivizing high quality user generated content in online question and answer forums. @cite_5 @cite_6 @cite_2 @cite_19 provided entertainment-like or monetary incentives for workers to label tasks in MTurk. The proliferation of mobile handheld devices triggers a variety of crowdsensing technologies. Pioneering sensing systems consist of NoiseTube @cite_20 for noise monitoring, SignalGuru @cite_8 for traffic monitoring, and some others @cite_6 . We categorize the literature on incentive mechanism design into two groups according to their methodologies: one is the auction based approach and the other is the game theoretic approach.
@cite_8 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_10 @cite_20
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The recent paradigm of mobile crowd sensing (MCS) enables a broad range of mobile applications. A critical challenge for the paradigm is to incentivize phone users to be workers providing sensing services. While some theoretical incentive mechanisms for general-purpose crowdsourcing have been proposed, it is still an open issue as to how to incorporate the theoretical framework into the practical MCS system. In this paper, we propose an incentive mechanism based on a quality-driven auction (QDA). The mechanism is specifically for the MCS system, where the worker is paid off based on the quality of sensed data instead of working time, as adopted in the literature. We theoretically prove that the mechanism is truthful, individual rational, platform profitable, and social-welfare optimal. Moreover, we incorporate our incentive mechanism into a Wi-Fi fingerprint-based indoor localization system to incentivize the MCS-based fingerprint collection. We present a probabilistic model to evaluate the reliability of the submitted data, which resolves the issue that the ground truth for the data reliability is unavailable. We realize and deploy an indoor localization system to evaluate our proposed incentive mechanism and present extensive experimental results. 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. Mobile phone sensing has become increasingly popular since it can collect and analyze real-time data anywhere anytime, especially with the help of mobile phone users via crowdsourcing. In order to stabilize the mobile crowdsourcing at a massive scale, incentive mechanisms are needed not only to stimulate the users of mobile phones to participate in sensing, but also to incentivize the organizer of the sensing tasks with maximum service time and payoff. In this paper, we study a practical problem in mobile sensing, i.e., sensing time uncertainty, which may lead to failures of existing incentive mechanisms. In particular, we model this problem as a perturbed Stackelberg game in which mobile phone users may actually conduct sensing tasks during different periods of time rather than what they intend, like through a trembling hand. We find that there exist Trembling-Hand Perfect Equilibria (THP) given proper rewards. After characterizing THPs in this game with rigorous analysis, we design incentive mechanisms that can achieve a THP with the maximum system wide total sensing time and maximum platform utility. We finally verify the correctness and efficiency of our proposed incentive mechanisms and algorithms through extensive experiments. Crowdsourcing systems allocate tasks to a group of workers over the Internet, which have become an effective paradigm for human-powered problem solving such as image classification, optical character recognition and proofreading. In this paper, we focus on incentivizing crowd workers to label a set of binary tasks under strict budget constraint. We properly profile the tasks' difficulty levels and workers' quality in crowdsourcing systems, where the collected labels are aggregated with sequential Bayesian approach. To stimulate workers to undertake crowd labeling tasks, the interaction between workers and the platform is modeled as a reverse auction. We reveal that the platform utility maximization could be intractable, for which an incentive mechanism that determines the winning bid and payments with polynomial-time computation complexity is developed. Moreover, we theoretically prove that our mechanism is truthful, individually rational and budget feasible. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our mechanism utilizes budget efficiently to achieve high platform utility with polynomial computation complexity.