BRRA

Abstract

Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) applications take advantage of the ubiquity and sensing power of smartphones in data gathering. Designing an incentive mechanism for motivating the individuals to participate in such systems is vital. Reverse Auction (RA) is a popular framework in which the participants bid their expected returns for their contributions, and a task creator selects a subset of them with a view to maximise the cumulative contribution within a prescribed budget. In RA, the participants are not aware of their winning probability before the auction is closed. If the participants are given some statistical information about the returns associated with their bid, they may reduce their bid in order to increase their returns. In this paper, we propose Bid-Revisable Reverse Auction (BRRA), as well as an enhancement called BRRA with Virtual Contribution (BRRA-VC), wherein the participants are allowed to revise their bids during the auction, based on the feedback they receive about the winning probability of their submitted bids. Through conducting extensive experiments, we show that in comparison to RA, the BRRA schemes not only benefit the task creator by increasing the return on investment (i.e., the total contribution for the same budget) and also by decreasing the participant dropout ratio, but also profit the participants who are open to revise their bids by increasing their received rewards as well as their winning chances.