Coupons as Monetary Incentives in Participatory Sensing

Participation of people is the most important factor in providing high quality of service in mobile sensing applications. In this paper we study coupons as incentives in order to stimulate users participation, especially in applications that rely on real-time data. We argue that coupons do not only function as incentives to increase user participation, but they can also direct more people to the targeted sensing area, increasing the overall utility of data for service providers. In this paper we study coupons in combination with multi-attributive auctions, which gives the additional advantage to service providers of not having to determine the coupon value that users would expect in exchange for their data. Instead users have to compete with each other to win the auction, choosing coupons of lower values. Even though the combination of coupons with multi-attributive auctions is very attractive for participatory sensing, we also highlight some of the problems coupons have and especially those connected with user privacy.