Crowdsourcing to Smartphones: Incentive Mechanism Design for Mobile Phone Sensing

Mobile phone sensing is a new paradigm which takes advantage of the pervasive Smartphones to collect and analyze data beyond the scale of what was previously possible. In a mobile phone sensing system, the platform recruits Smartphone users to provide sensing service. Existing mobile phone sensing applications and systems lack good incentive mechanisms that can attract more user participation. To address this issue, the authors design incentive mechanisms for mobile phone sensing. They consider two system models: the platform-centric model where the platform provides a reward shared by participating users, and the user-centric model where users have more control over the payment they will receive.