Incentive Mechanism for Improving Task Completion Quality in Mobile Crowdsensing

Due to the randomness of participants’ movement and the selfishness and dishonesty of individuals in crowdsensing, the quality of the sensing data collected by the server platform is uncertain. Therefore, it is necessary to design a reasonable incentive mechanism in crowdsensing to ensure the stability of the sensing data quality. Most of the existing incentive mechanisms for data quality in crowdsensing are based on traditional economics, which believe that the decision of participants to complete a task depends on whether the benefit of the task is greater than the cost of completing the task. However, behavioral economics shows that people will be affected by the cost of investment in the past, resulting in decision-making bias. Therefore, different from the existing incentive mechanism researches, this paper considers the impact of sunk cost on user decision-making. An incentive mechanism based on sunk cost called IMBSC is proposed to motivate participants to improve data quality. The IMBSC mechanism stimulates the sunk cost effect of participants by designing effort sensing reference factor and withhold factor to improve their own data quality. The effectiveness of the IMBSC mechanism is verified from three aspects of platform utility, participant utility and the number of tasks completed through simulation experiments. The simulation results show that compared with the system without IMBSC mechanism, the platform utility is increased by more than 100%, the average utility of participants is increased by about 6%, and the task completion is increased by more than 50%.