Skip to main content
Article
Profit-Maximizing Incentive for Participatory Sensing
Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (2014, Toronto, ON, Canada)
  • Tony Tie Luo, Missouri University of Science and Technology
  • Hwee Pink Tan
  • Lirong Xia
Abstract

We design an incentive mechanism based on all-pay auctions for participatory sensing. The organizer (principal) aims to attract a high amount of contribution from participating users (agents) while at the same time lowering his payout, which we formulate as a profit-maximization problem. We use a contribution-dependent prize function in an environment that is specifically tailored to participatory sensing, namely incomplete information (with information asymmetry), risk-averse agents, and stochastic population. We derive the optimal prize function that induces the maximum profit for the principal, while satisfying strict individual rationality (i.e., strictly have incentive to participate at equilibrium) for both risk-neutral and weakly risk-averse agents. The thus induced profit is demonstrated to be higher than the maximum profit induced by constant (yet optimized) prize. We also show that our results are readily extensible to cases of risk-neutral agents and deterministic populations.

Meeting Name
33rd IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, IEEE INFOCOM 2014 (2014: Apr. 27-May 2, Toronto, ON, Canada)
Department(s)
Computer Science
Keywords and Phrases
  • all-pay auction,
  • Bayesian game,
  • crowdsensing,
  • Mechanism design,
  • network economics,
  • perturbation analysis
International Standard Book Number (ISBN)
978-147993360-0
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2014 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), All rights reserved.
Publication Date
5-1-2014
Publication Date
01 May 2014
Disciplines
Citation Information
Tony Tie Luo, Hwee Pink Tan and Lirong Xia. "Profit-Maximizing Incentive for Participatory Sensing" Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (2014, Toronto, ON, Canada) (2014) p. 127 - 135 ISSN: 0743-166X
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tony-luo/50/