Mobile sensing has become a promising paradigm for mobile users to obtain information by task crowd- sourcing. However, due to the social preferences of mobile users, the quality of sensing reports may be impacted by the underlying social attributes and selfishness of individuals. Therefore, it is crucial to con- sider the social impacts and trustworthiness of mobile users when selecting task participants in mobile sensing. In this paper, we propose a Social Aware Crowdsourcing with Reputation Management (SACRM) scheme to select the well-suited participants and allocate the task rewards in mobile sensing. Specifically, we consider the social attributes, task delay and reputation in crowdsourcing and propose a participant selection scheme to choose the well-suited participants for the sensing task under a fixed task budget. A report assessment and rewarding scheme is also introduced to measure the quality of the sensing reports and allocate the task rewards based the assessed report quality. In addition, we develop a reputation management scheme to evaluate the trustworthiness and cost performance ratio of mobile users for par- ticipant selection. Theoretical analysis and extensive simulations demonstrate that SACRM can efficiently improve the crowdsourcing utility and effectively stimulate the participants to improve the quality of their sensing reports.
Dynamic pricing is an effective incentive mechanism widely used in mobile sensing @cite_21 @cite_4 @cite_1 @cite_19 . Yang et. al. @cite_21 propose two incentive mechanisms to stimulate mobile users' participation respectively for platform-centric and user-centric mobile sensing. For the platform-centric model, they present a Stackelberg game @cite_20 based incentive mechanism to maximize the utility of the platform. For the user-centric model, they design an auction-based incentive mechanism that is proved to be computationally efficient, individually rational, profitable and truthful. Jaimes et. al. @cite_4 propose a recurrent reverse auction incentive mechanism using a greedy algorithm to select a representative subset of users according to their locations under a fixed budget. @cite_1 , the authors develop and evaluate a reverse auction based dynamic pricing incentive mechanism to stimulate mobile users' participation and reduce the incentive cost. Besides the dynamic pricing mechanism, personal demand and social relationship are introduced into the incentive mechanism study @cite_10 @cite_0 @cite_12 . Luo et. al. @cite_10 link the incentive to personal demand for consuming compelling services. Based on the demand principle, two incentive schemes, called Incentive with Demand Fairness (IDF) and Iterative Tank Filling (ITF), are proposed to maximize fairness and social welfare, respectively.
@cite_4 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_10 @cite_12 @cite_20
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Participatory sensing has emerged recently as a promising approach to large-scale data collection. However, without incentives for users to regularly contribute good quality data, this method is unlikely to be viable in the long run. In this paper, we link incentive to users' demand for consuming compelling services, as an approach complementary to conventional credit or reputation based approaches. With this demand-based principle, we design two incentive schemes, Incentive with Demand Fairness (IDF) and Iterative Tank Filling (ITF), for maximizing fairness and social welfare, respectively. Our study shows that the IDF scheme is max-min fair and can score close to 1 on the Jain's fairness index, while the ITF scheme maximizes social welfare and achieves a unique Nash equilibrium which is also Pareto and globally optimal. We adopted a game theoretic approach to derive the optimal service demands. Furthermore, to address practical considerations, we use a stochastic programming technique to handle uncertainty that is often encountered in real life situations. Mobile phone sensing is a new paradigm which takes advantage of the pervasive smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. In a mobile phone sensing system, the platform recruits smartphone users to provide sensing service. Existing mobile phone sensing applications and systems lack good incentive mechanisms that can attract more user participation. To address this issue, we design incentive mechanisms for mobile phone sensing. We consider two system models: the platform-centric model where the platform provides a reward shared by participating users, and the user-centric model where users have more control over the payment they will receive. For the platform-centric model, we design an incentive mechanism using a Stackelberg game, where the platform is the leader while the users are the followers. We show how to compute the unique Stackelberg Equilibrium, at which the utility of the platform is maximized, and none of the users can improve its utility by unilaterally deviating from its current strategy. For the user-centric model, we design an auction-based incentive mechanism, which is computationally efficient, individually rational, profitable, and truthful. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate the theoretical properties of our incentive mechanisms. We study the dynamic mechanism design problem of a seller who repeatedly sells independent items to a buyer with private values. In this setting, the seller could potentially extract the entire buyer surplus by running efficient auctions and charging an upfront participation fee at the beginning of the horizon. In some markets, such as internet advertising, participation fees are not practical since buyers expect to inspect items before purchasing them. This motivates us to study the design of dynamic mechanisms under successively more stringent requirements that capture the implicit business constraints of these markets. We first consider a periodic individual rationality constraint, which limits the mechanism to charge at most the buyer's value in each period. While this prevents large upfront participation fees, the seller can still design mechanisms that spread a participation fee across the first few auctions. These mechanisms have the unappealing feature that they provide close-to-zero buyer utility in earlier auctions in exchange for higher utility in later auctions. To address this problem, we introduce a martingale utility constraint, which imposes the requirement that from the perspective of the buyer, the next item's expected utility is equal to the present one's. Our main result is providing a dynamic auction satisfying martingale utility and periodic individual rationality whose loss in profit with respect to first-best (full extraction of buyer surplus) is optimal up to polylogarithmic factors. The proposed mechanism is a dynamic two-tier auction with a hard floor and a soft floor that allocates the item whenever the buyer's bid is above the hard floor and charges the minimum of the bid and the soft floor. This paper studies economic models of user participation incentive in participatory sensing applications. User participation is the most important element in participatory sensing applications for providing adequate level of service quality. However, incentive mechanism and its economic model for user participation have never been addressed so far in this research domain. In order to stimulate user participation, we design and evaluate a novel Reverse Auction based Dynamic Price (RADP) incentive mechanism, where users can sell their sensing data to a service provider with users' claimed bid prices. The proposed incentive mechanism focuses on minimizing and stabilizing incentive cost while maintaining adequate number of participants by preventing users from dropping out of participatory sensing applications. Compared with a Random Selection with Fixed Price (RSFP) incentive mechanism, the proposed mechanism not only reduces the incentive cost for retaining same number of participants by more than 60 but also improves the fairness of incentive distribution and social welfare. More importantly, RADP can remove burden of accurate pricing for user sensing data, the most difficult step in RSFP.