Online incentive mechanism design for smartphone crowd-sourcing

In this paper, we consider the problem of online incentive mechanism design for smart-phone crowd-sourcing. We consider the online setting where users arrive in a sequence and each user participating in crowd-sourcing submits a set of tasks it can accomplish and its corresponding bid. The platform then selects the users and their payments to maximize its utility while ensuring truthfulness, individual rationality, profitability, and polynomial algorithm complexity. The decision whether to accept or reject each user is made instantaneously, with no revocation. We propose an algorithm and show that it satisfies all the four desired properties of an efficient auction. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of our online algorithm.