Contact Tracing Incentive for COVID-19 and Other Pandemic Diseases From a Crowdsourcing Perspective

Governments of the world have invested a lot of manpower and material resources to combat COVID-19 this year. At this moment, the most efficient way that could stop the epidemic is to leverage the contact tracing system to monitor people’s daily contact information and isolate the close contacts of COVID-19. However, the contact tracing data usually contains people’s sensitive information that they do not want to share with the contact tracing system and government. Conversely, the contact tracing system could perform better when it obtains more detailed contact tracing data. In this article, we treat the process of collecting contact tracing data from a crowdsourcing perspective in order to motivate users to contribute more contact tracing data and propose the incentive algorithm named CovidCrowd. Different from previous works where they ask users to contribute their data voluntarily, the government offers some reward to users who upload their contact tracing data to reimburse the privacy and data processing cost. We formulate the problem as a Stackelberg game and show there exists a Nash equilibrium for any user given the fixed reward value. Then, CovidCrowd computes the optimal reward value which could maximize the utility of the system. Finally, we conduct a large-scale simulation with thousands of users and evaluation with real-world data set. Both results show that CovidCrowd outperforms the benchmarks, e.g., the user participating level is improved by at least 13.2% for all evaluation scenarios.