Optimal Selection of Crowdsourcing Workers Balancing Their Utilities and Platform Profit

In a mobile crowdsourcing system (MCS), a platform outsources sensing tasks to numerous mobile worker devices. The collected data are analyzed and the processed information is shared among many other interested users. The platform pays the workers for the sensing data and earns money from the users receiving processed information services. Distributing the sensing workloads among the potential workers so as to maintain the required data quality and to make a reasonable amount of profit is a challenging problem for such a platform. In this paper, we develop a workload allocation policy that makes a reasonable tradeoff between worker utilities and platform profit. It quantifies the utility (i.e., the quality of sensed data) of a worker as a function of…