No Arabic abstract
Cooperative multihop communication can greatly increase network throughput, yet packet forwarding for other nodes involves opportunity and energy cost for relays. Thus one of the pre-requisite problems in the successful implementation of multihop transmission is how to foster cooperation among selfish nodes. Existing researches mainly adopt monetary stimulating. In this manuscript, we propose instead a simple and self-enforcing forwarding incentive scheme free of indirect monetary remunerating for asymmetric (uplink multihop, downlink single-hop) cellar network based on coalitional game theory, which comprises double compensation, namely, Inter- BEA, global stimulating policy allotting resources among relaying coalitions according to group size, and Intra-BEA, local compensating and allocating rule within coalitions. Firstly, given the global allotting policy, we introduce a fair allocation estimating approach which includes remunerating for relaying cost using Myerson value for partition function game, to enlighten the design of local allocating rules. Secondly, given the inter- and intra-BEA relay fostering approach, we check stability of coalition structures in terms of internal and external stability as well as inductive core. Theoretic analysis and numerical simulation show that our measure can provide communication opportunities for outer ring nodes and enlarge system coverage, while at the same time provide enough motivation with respect to resource allocation and energy saving for nodes in inner and middle ring to relay for own profits.
We study the optimal pricing strategies of a monopolist selling a divisible good (service) to consumers that are embedded in a social network. A key feature of our model is that consumers experience a (positive) local network effect. In particular, each consumers usage level depends directly on the usage of her neighbors in the social network structure. Thus, the monopolists optimal pricing strategy may involve offering discounts to certain agents, who have a central position in the underlying network. First, we consider a setting where the monopolist can offer individualized prices and derive an explicit characterization of the optimal price for each consumer as a function of her network position. In particular, we show that it is optimal for the monopolist to charge each agent a price that is proportional to her Bonacich centrality in the social network. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the optimal strategy of a monopolist that can only choose a single uniform price for the good and derive an algorithm polynomial in the number of agents to compute such a price. Thirdly, we assume that the monopolist can offer the good in two prices, full and discounted, and study the problem of determining which set of consumers should be given the discount. We show that the problem is NP-hard, however we provide an explicit characterization of the set of agents that should be offered the discounted price. Next, we describe an approximation algorithm for finding the optimal set of agents. We show that if the profit is nonnegative under any feasible price allocation, the algorithm guarantees at least 88% of the optimal profit. Finally, we highlight the value of network information by comparing the profits of a monopolist that does not take into account the network effects when choosing her pricing policy to those of a monopolist that uses this information optimally.
Mobile crowdsensing has shown a great potential to address large-scale data sensing problems by allocating sensing tasks to pervasive mobile users. The mobile users will participate in a crowdsensing platform if they can receive satisfactory reward. In this paper, to effectively and efficiently recruit sufficient number of mobile users, i.e., participants, we investigate an optimal incentive mechanism of a crowdsensing service provider. We apply a two-stage Stackelberg game to analyze the participation level of the mobile users and the optimal incentive mechanism of the crowdsensing service provider using backward induction. In order to motivate the participants, the incentive is designed by taking into account the social network effects from the underlying mobile social domain. For example, in a crowdsensing-based road traffic information sharing application, a user can get a better and accurate traffic report if more users join and share their road information. We derive the analytical expressions for the discriminatory incentive as well as the uniform incentive mechanisms. To fit into practical scenarios, we further formulate a Bayesian Stackelberg game with incomplete information to analyze the interaction between the crowdsensing service provider and mobile users, where the social structure information (the social network effects) is uncertain. The existence and uniqueness of the Bayesian Stackelberg equilibrium are validated by identifying the best response strategies of the mobile users. Numerical results corroborate the fact that the network effects tremendously stimulate higher mobile participation level and greater revenue of the crowdsensing service provider. In addition, the social structure information helps the crowdsensing service provider to achieve greater revenue gain.
Federated learning (FL) has shown great potential for addressing the challenge of isolated data islands while preserving data privacy. It allows artificial intelligence (AI) models to be trained on locally stored data in a distributed manner. In order to build an ecosystem for FL to operate in a sustainable manner, it has to be economically attractive to data owners. This gives rise to the problem of FL incentive mechanism design, which aims to find the optimal organizational and payment structure for the federation in order to achieve a series of economic objectives. In this paper, we present a VCG-based FL incentive mechanism, named FVCG, specifically designed for incentivizing data owners to contribute all their data and truthfully report their costs in FL settings. It maximizes the social surplus and minimizes unfairness of the federation. We provide an implementation of FVCG with neural networks and theoretic proofs on its performance bounds. Extensive numerical experiment results demonstrated the effectiveness and economic reasonableness of FVCG.
Crowd sensing is a new paradigm which leverages the ubiquity of sensor-equipped mobile devices to collect data. To achieve good quality for crowd sensing, incentive mechanisms are indispensable to attract more participants. Most of existing mechanisms focus on the expected utility prior to sensing, ignoring the risk of low quality solution and privacy leakage. Traditional incentive mechanisms such as the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism and its variants are not applicable here. In this paper, to address these challenges, we propose a behavior based incentive mechanism for crowd sensing applications with budget constraints by applying sequential all-pay auctions in mobile social networks (MSNs), not only to consider the effects of extensive user participation, but also to maximize high quality of the context based sensing content submission for crowd sensing platform under the budget constraints, where users arrive in a sequential order. Through an extensive simulation, results indicate that incentive mechanisms in our proposed framework outperform the best existing solution.
The Borda voting rule is a positional scoring rule for $z$ candidates such that in each vote, the first candidate receives $z-1$ points, the second $z-2$ points and so on. The winner in the Borda rule is the candidate with highest total score. We study the manipulation problem of the Borda rule in a setting with two non-manipulators while one of the non-manipulators vote is weighted. We demonstrate a sharp contrast on computational complexity depending on the weight of the non-manipulator: the problem is NP-hard when the weight is larger than $1$ while there exists an efficient algorithm to find a manipulation when the weight is at most $1$.