Fair Incentive Allocation for Secure Data Sharing in Blockchain Systems: A Shapley Value Based Mechanism

In the contemporary era of information technology, the exponential surge in data has rendered colossal potential value, which would be fully unlocked through data circulation and sharing. However, when the data contains sensitive information, special attention must be paid to the data privacy and security problem for data sharing. A feasible solution is to incorporate blockchain technology into the data sharing system, and the new challenge is how to provide fair rewards for data owners to motivate them to contribute data. To address this challenge, in this paper, we first design a blockchain-based data sharing system to enhance the trust and reliability of the data shared among participants. Then we propose an incentive allocation method based on the Shapley value, which comprehensively incorporates each participant’s contribution while ensuring fairness for the allocation. Finally, multiple numerical simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism.