Stackelberg Game Based Incentive Mechanisms for Multiple Collaborative Tasks in Mobile Crowdsourcing

In this paper, we tackle the problem of stimulating users to join mobile crowdsourcing applications with personal devices such as smartphones and tablets. Wireless personal networks facilitate to exploit the communication opportunity and makes diverse spare-resource of personal devices utilized. However, it is a challenge to motivate sufficient users to provide their resource of personal devices for achieving good quality of service. To address this problem, we propose an incentive framework based on Stackelberg game to model the interaction between the server and users. Traditional incentive mechanisms are applied for either single task or multiple dependent tasks, which fails to consider the interrelation among various tasks. In this paper, we focus on the common realistic scenario with multiple collaborative tasks, where each task requires a group of users to perform collaboratively. Specifically, participants would consider task priority and the server would design suitable reward functions to allocate the total payment. Considering the information of users' costs and the types of tasks, four incentive mechanisms are presented for various cases to the above problem, which are proved to have the Nash equilibrium solutions in all cases for maximizing the utility of the server. Moreover, online incentive mechanisms are further proposed for real time tasks. Through both rigid theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed mechanisms have good performance and high computational efficiency in real world applications.