A Cost-Aware Incentive Mechanism in Mobile Crowdsourcing Systems

Abstract

The rapid growth of ubiquitous mobile smart devices has led to the creation of a new era of mobile crowdsourcing applications, where human workers participate and perform tasks in exchange of a monetary reward. Such crowdsourcing systems can play a vital role during emergency events, where fast and accurate responses are needed. However, a commonly ignored aspect is how the price (i.e. the reward paid to workers) must be set in order for the system to meet two important requirements: (i) to timely receive an adequate number of responses which is crucial during emergencies, and (ii) to meet budget constraints. In the majority of the existing systems, the price per task is set up-front and remains unchanged for all upcoming tasks, leading to either higher monetary cost than necessary or to significantly larger latency than expected. In this work, we provide a formulation based on Kalman Filters that enables the system to estimate the user/worker behavior, i.e., the likelihood over time for a user to provide answers for a specific reward. Specifically, we focus on the problem of developing an adaptive pricing policy to incentivize the users to rapidly provide their responses. Our mechanism can be adjusted dynamically to bridge the gap among the users' behavior and the system's needs so as to maximize the overall utility of the system. We simulate our model and through extensive experimental evaluation we show how our system performs and provides benefits to both the users and the system operator.