An Insurance-based Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowdsourcing to Improve System Security

In a crowdsourcing system, security is a critical issue which affects the participation willingness of users. To motivate users' participation, most of existing work provide additional reward to compensate their loss due to security issues. However, more efficient way is to motivate the users to arm with higher security capability, to reduce the infection probability from the attackers and malicious software. In this paper, we propose an insurance-based incentive framework to motivate the users to upgrade to a higher security level. The framework can be formed as a Stackelberg game, where crowdsourcing platform is the leader and the users are followers. Through backward induction, we found that a Nash Equilibrium exists in the Stackelberg game. Simulation result shows that the proposed mechanism can enhance both social welfare, platform utility and users' utility in the crowdsourcing system.