As the driving force of crowdsourcing is the interaction among participants, various incentive mechanisms have been proposed to attract sufficient participants. However, the existing works assume that all the providers always meet the deadline and the task value accordingly remains constant. To bridge the gap of such impractical assumption, we model the heterogeneous punctuality behavior of providers and the task value depreciation of requesters. Based on those models, we propose an Expected Social Welfare Maximizing (ESWM) mechanism that aims to maximize the expected social welfare in polynomial time. Simulation results show that our heuristic-based mechanism achieves higher expected social welfare and platform utility via attracting more participants.
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. User participation is one of the most important elements in participatory sensing application for providing adequate level of service quality. However, incentive mechanism and its economic model for user participation have been less addressed so far in this research domain. This paper studies the economic model of user participation incentive in participatory sensing applications. To stimulate user participation, we design and evaluate a novel reverse auction based dynamic pricing 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 the incentive cost while maintaining adequate level of participants by preventing users from dropping out of participatory sensing applications. Compared with random selection based fixed pricing incentive mechanism, the proposed mechanism not only reduces the incentive cost for retaining the same number of participants but also improves the fairness of incentive distribution and social welfare. It also helps us to achieve the geographically balanced sensing measurements and, more importantly, can remove the burden of accurate price decision for user data that is the most difficult step in designing incentive mechanism. 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.