Contract-Based Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowdsourcing Networks

Mobile crowdsourcing networks (MCNs) are a promising method of data collecting and processing by leveraging the mobile devices’ sensing and computing capabilities. However, because of the selfish characteristics of the service provider (SP) and mobile users (MUs), crowdsourcing participants only aim to maximize their own benefits. This paper investigates the incentive mechanism between the above two parties to create mutual benefits. By modeling MCNs as a labor market, a contract-based crowdsourcing model with moral hazard is proposed under the asymmetric information scenario. In order to incentivize the potential MUs to participate in crowdsourcing tasks, the optimization problem is formulated to maximize the SP’s utility by jointly examining the crowdsourcing participants’ risk preferences. The impact of crowdsourcing participants’ attitudes of risks on the incentive mechanism has been studied analytically and experimentally. Numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed contract design scheme for the crowdsourcing incentive.