Network Economics-based Crowdsourcing in Online Social Networks
Aisha B Rahman, Md Sadman Siraj, Natasha Kubiak, Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou, Symeon Papavassiliou · GLOBECOM 2022 - 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference · 2022
In this paper, the problem of user recruitment by different competing marketing agencies (MAs) is treated, towards contributing to the development of an effective crowdsourcing framework applicable in Online Social Networks. Initially, a labor economics approach, following the principles of contract theory, is devised to enable the marketing agencies to reveal the potential of each participating user to contribute a personalized level of quality and quantity of information to the crowdsourcing process. The overall objective of each MA in the aforementioned competitive environment is to maximize their personal benefit, i.e., total utility obtained by the user recruitment process, given its available total budget. The latter optimization problem is formulated and solved as a Generalized Colonel Blotto (GCB) game among the MAs, where each MA aims at properly incen-tivizing each user to report its information to this agency. A Pure Nash Equilibrium (PNE) is determined resulting in the optimal rewards that each marketing agency should provide to each user. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach is achieved via modeling and simulation, and detailed numerical results are presented to reveal the benefits of the proposed crowdsourcing model under different scenarios.