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.
X. @cite_13 proposed truthful incentive mechanisms for the case where participants' cooperation may be required to finish a job. Using Tullock contest, T. @cite_27 designed an incentive mechanism to maximize the crowdsourcing service user’s profit. L. @cite_12 proposed an incentive mechanism for smartphone collaboration in distributed computing using contract theory under two different scenarios having complete and incomplete information of participants.
@cite_27 @cite_13 @cite_12
1536369969 2164890430 2126045912 1987352480
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. We consider schemes for obtaining truthful reports on a common but hidden signal from large groups of rational, self-interested agents. One example are online feedback mechanisms, where users provide observations about the quality of a product or service so that other users can have an accurate idea of what quality they can expect. However, (i) providing such feedback is costly, and (ii) there are many motivations for providing incorrect feedback. Both problems can be addressed by reward schemes which (i) cover the cost of obtaining and reporting feedback, and (ii) maximize the expected reward of a rational agent who reports truthfully. We address the design of such incentive-compatible rewards for feedback generated in environments with pure adverse selection. Here, the correlation between the true knowledge of an agent and her beliefs regarding the likelihoods of reports of other agents can be exploited to make honest reporting a Nash equilibrium. In this paper we extend existing methods for designing incentive-compatible rewards by also considering collusion. We analyze different scenarios, where, for example, some or all of the agents collude. For each scenario we investigate whether a collusion-resistant, incentive-compatible reward scheme exists, and use automated mechanism design to specify an algorithm for deriving an efficient reward mechanism. This paper analyzes and compares different incentive mechanisms for a client to motivate the collaboration of smartphone users on both data acquisition and distributed computing applications. In this paper we consider a mechanism design problem in the context of large-scale crowdsourcing markets such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk mturk, ClickWorker clickworker, CrowdFlower crowdflower. In these markets, there is a requester who wants to hire workers to accomplish some tasks. Each worker is assumed to give some utility to the requester on getting hired. Moreover each worker has a minimum cost that he wants to get paid for getting hired. This minimum cost is assumed to be private information of the workers. The question then is -- if the requester has a limited budget, how to design a direct revelation mechanism that picks the right set of workers to hire in order to maximize the requester's utility? We note that although the previous work (Singer (2010) (2011)) has studied this problem, a crucial difference in which we deviate from earlier work is the notion of large-scale markets that we introduce in our model. Without the large market assumption, it is known that no mechanism can achieve a competitive ratio better than 0.414 and 0.5 for deterministic and randomized mechanisms respectively (while the best known deterministic and randomized mechanisms achieve an approximation ratio of 0.292 and 0.33 respectively). In this paper, we design a budget-feasible mechanism for large markets that achieves a competitive ratio of 1 -- 1 e = 0.63. Our mechanism can be seen as a generalization of an alternate way to look at the proportional share mechanism, which is used in all the previous works so far on this problem. Interestingly, we can also show that our mechanism is optimal by showing that no truthful mechanism can achieve a factor better than 1 -- 1 e, thus, fully resolving this setting. Finally we consider the more general case of submodular utility functions and give new and improved mechanisms for the case when the market is large.