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Collaborative Data Acquisition

We consider a requester who acquires a set of data (e.g. images) that is not owned by one party. In order to collect as many data as possible, crowdsourcing mechanisms have been widely used to seek help from the crowd. However, existing mechanisms rely on third-party platforms, and the workers from these platforms are not necessarily helpful and redundant data are also not properly handled. To combat this problem, we propose a novel crowdsourcing mechanism based on social networks, where the rewards of the workers are calculated by information entropy and a modified Shapley value. This mechanism incentivizes the workers from the network to not only provide all data they have but also further invite their neighbours to offer more data. Eventually, the mechanism is able to acquire all data from all workers on the network and the requester's cost is no more than the value of the data acquired. The experiments show that our mechanism outperforms traditional crowdsourcing mechanisms.