Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowdsourcing Using an Optimized Tournament Model

With the wide adoption of smart mobile devices, there is a rapid development of location-based services. One key feature of supporting a pleasant/excellent service is the access to adequate and comprehensive data, which can be obtained by mobile crowdsourcing. The main challenge in crowdsourcing is...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE journal on selected areas in communications 2017-04, Vol.35 (4), p.880-892
Main Authors: Yanru Zhang, Chunxiao Jiang, Lingyang Song, Miao Pan, Dawy, Zaher, Zhu Han
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
contract theory
Contracts
Crowdsourcing
Electric shock
Electronic devices
Electronic mail
incentive mechanism
Incentives
Location based services
Mathematical models
Measurement errors
Mobile communication
Mobile crowdsourcing
moral hazard
Numerical models
Optimization
tournament
Utilities
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Summary:With the wide adoption of smart mobile devices, there is a rapid development of location-based services. One key feature of supporting a pleasant/excellent service is the access to adequate and comprehensive data, which can be obtained by mobile crowdsourcing. The main challenge in crowdsourcing is how the service provider (principal) incentivizes a large group of mobile users to participate. In this paper, we investigate the problem of designing a crowdsourcing tournament to maximize the principal's utility in crowdsourcing and provide continuous incentives for users by rewarding them based on the rank achieved. First, we model the user's utility of reward from achieving one of the winning ranks in the tournament. Then, the utility maximization problem of the principal is formulated, under the constraint that the user maximizes its own utility by choosing the optimal effort in the crowdsourcing tournament. Finally, we present numerical results to show the parameters' impact on the tournament design and compare the system performance under the different proposed incentive mechanisms. We show that by using the tournament, the principal successfully maximizes the utilities, and users obtain the continuous incentives to participate in the crowdsourcing activity.
ISSN:0733-8716
1558-0008
DOI:10.1109/JSAC.2017.2680798