A Secure Incentive Mechanism for Competitive Organization Data Sharing: A Contract Theoretic Approach

With the development of information technology, various data-driven intelligent services have changed our daily life greatly. As the data fuels the development of these services, data sharing is desirable for data availability issues. Many mechanisms and technologies have been proposed to support data sharing. However, some organizations, especially with potential competitive relationships are still reluctant to share their data. On one hand, no data holder wish to see the competitiveness improvement of competitors by data sharing. On the other hand, data sharing suffers from huge privacy security risks. To encourage data sharing, in this paper, a competitiveness-driven and secure incentive mechanism is proposed. By introducing the concept of data competitiveness as incentive motivation, competitiveness worry of data holders is eliminated. Privacy is protected by adopting differential privacy. As the privacy protection levels of data holders are unknown to the data demander, a contract theoretic approach is proposed to formulate the incentive mechanism. With the design of optimal contracts, the data demander can make the best decisions to pay data holders and data holders can optimize their utilities by choosing proper contracts. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed incentive scheme.