# Towards Crowdsourcing Internet of Things (Crowd-IoT): Architectures, Security and Applications
## 6 Applications for Crowd-IoT
### Specific Applications
#### 6.2.5 Finance, Budget & Pricing  
Crowdsourcing is viewed as a viable technique in the IoT paradigm for offering effective sensing, computing, and processing services to a specific job produced by consumers, utilizing the power of the crowd in an efficient manner. Within the crowdsourcing-based  
Figure 37: SMCS high-level architecture [115]. IoT paradigm, to appropriately price tasks of customers is critical for platforms to optimize their utility. Crowdsourcing-based IoT has been leveraged to develop solutions that improve efficiency, performance, quality of service (QoS), as well as customer satisfaction. [PERSON] [118] constructed a blockchain-enabled crowdsourcing platform that combined resource lending function and task assignment through a pair of customized smart contracts to ensure the security, as well as dependability of interacting users while overcoming the limitations of centralization. Figure 38 shows the blockchain-based hierarchical crowdsourcing platform. The platform is comprised of two smart contracts (task matching contract and resource marketing contract), workers, customers, and resource providers. Using economic modelling methodologies and heterogeneous agent theory, the authors developed a dynamic hierarchical pricing system to maintain stability of financial transaction within the blockchain-enabled market. It also ensures that the job complexity received is matched with the appropriate worker's competence. The system is therefore applied to dynamically divide the market into several levels making use of customer compensation offer and the market worth of the employees' resources. Additional restrictions are recommended in the market to avoid potentially harmful training behavior by resource lending workers. Extensive experimental outcomes revealed the platform's feasibility and correctness, and proved that the pricing mechanism could sustain market stability. Using VCG and quality of all-pay, [PERSON] [119] presented a collaborative crowdsourcing reverse pricing system (VCG-QCP). The authors examined a real crowdsourcing scenario using the VCG method and introduced the idea of quality all-pay to assess the quality of job of employees that execute the tasks. The price algorithm was then built based on a generic reverse pricing model through mathematical modeling. Simulations indicated that the suggested method could realize greater algorithm effectiveness, improved job completion quality, suitable equal advantages among employers and employees, as well as ensure the veracity of employees' bids. [PERSON] [120] presented a method based on crowdsourcing for determining fair pricing of wireless service in the IoT. The authors focused on an oligopoly where the regulation dynamically establishes a maximum permitted cost of service to avoid anti-trust conduct and unfair policy of pricing services. As a result, they suggested a three-tier pricing model in which the regulator, wireless network providers, as well as clients, are all players and considers client's preferences to find fair service pricing slightly above each network provider's marginal costs. Their results demonstrated that the proposed model was not susceptible to complicity and could, at most, converge when one network provider declared the fair price. [PERSON] [121] investigated the utility maximization of crowdsourcing platforms by determining the best pricing policy for requested jobs. They formulated the pricing strategy  
Figure 38: Blockchain-based hierarchical crowdsourcing platform [118]. as a finite sum optimization problem where the nodes attempt to realize a general agreement pertaining to the pricing policy of every job. The authors further employed the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) type algorithm non-convex primal-dual splitting with exact minimization (NESTT-E) to resolve the optimization problem in a distributed and asynchronous manner. The numerical outcomes revealed that NESTT-E achieved better effectiveness compared to synchronous ADMM and traditional SGD in terms of greater number of active nodes.