Promoting Truthful Behaviour in Participatory-Sensing Mechanisms

TL;DR

This paper investigates how certain nonlinear estimators can incentivize truthful reporting from strategic sensors in participatory sensing, even with noiseless measurements, and examines their performance with coalitions and noise.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a class of nonlinear estimators can ensure truth-telling as an equilibrium in participatory sensing scenarios.

Findings

Truth-telling is an equilibrium with noiseless measurements.

Estimator performance degrades with sensor coalitions.

Noise impacts the effectiveness of the estimators.

Abstract

In this paper, the interplay between a class of nonlinear estimators and strategic sensors is studied in several participatory-sensing scenarios. It is shown that for the class of estimators, if the strategic sensors have access to noiseless measurements of the to-be-estimated-variable, truth-telling is an equilibrium of the game that models the interplay between the sensors and the estimator. Furthermore, performance of the proposed estimators is examined in the case that the strategic sensors form coalitions and in the presence of noise.