Crowdsourcing can be applied to the Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems to provide more scalable and efficient services to support various tasks. As the driving force of crowdsourcing is the interaction among participants, various incentive mechanisms have been proposed to attract and retain a sufficient number of participants to provide a sustainable crowdsourcing service. However, there exist some gaps between the modeled entities or markets in the existing works and those in reality: 1) task valuation and workers' punctuality, and 2) crowdsourcing service market by a platform. To bridge those gaps of such impractical assumption, we model workers' heterogeneous punctuality behavior and task depreciation over time. Based on those models, we propose an Expected Social Welfare Maximizing (ESWM) mechanism that aims to maximize the expected social welfare by attracting and retaining more participants in the long-term, i.e., multiple rounds of crowdsourcing. In the evaluation, we modeled the continuous competition between the ESWM and one of the existing works in both short-term and long-term scenarios. Simulation results show that the ESWM mechanism achieves higher expected social welfare and platform utility than the benchmark by attracting and retaining more participants. Moreover, we prove that the ESWM mechanism achieves the desirable economic properties: individual rationality, budget-balance, computational efficiency, and truthfulness.
J. @cite_34 proposed a behavior-based incentive mechanism for crowdsensing with budget constraint. This work aims to achieve both the extensive user participation and high quality sensing data submission, based on users’ behavior abilities. S. @cite_17 presented an incentive mechanism for mobile phones with uncertain sensing time. In order to address the sensing time uncertainty problem, this work modeled the problem as a perturbed Stackelberg game where mobile phone users sensing task times may be different from their original plans. T. @cite_20 proposed an incentive mechanism for heterogeneous crowdsourcing using all-pay contests where workers have not only different type information (abilities and costs), but also the different beliefs (probabilistic knowledge) about their respective type information. In this work, the belief is modeled as a probability distribution.
@cite_34 @cite_20 @cite_17
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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. 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. 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. Mobile crowdsourced sensing (MCS) is a new paradigm which takes advantage of pervasive smartphones to efficiently collect data, enabling numerous novel applications. To achieve good service quality for a MCS application, incentive mechanisms are necessary to attract more user participation. Most of existing mechanisms apply only for the offline scenario where all users' information are known a priori. On the contrary, we focus on a more realistic scenario where users arrive one by one online in a random order. Based on the online auction model, we investigate the problem that users submit their private types to the crowdsourcer when arrive, and the crowdsourcer aims at selecting a subset of users before a specified deadline for maximizing the value of services (assumed to be a non-negative monotone submodular function) provided by selected users under a budget constraint. We design two online mechanisms, OMZ and OMG, satisfying the computational efficiency, individual rationality, budget feasibility, truthfulness, consumer sovereignty and constant competitiveness under the zero arrival-departure interval case and a more general case, respectively. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate the theoretical properties of our online mechanisms.