LiveCompare: Grocery Bargain Hunting Through Participatory Sensing

摘要

Many consumers are misled into paying high prices due to the search costs associated with attaining price information [16]. The popularity of bargain-hunting web sites like Slickdeals.net, which boasts 2.5 million visitors per month, hints that many shoppers are indeed in search of tools to help them save money. We present LiveCompare, a system that leverages the ubiquity of mobile camera phones to allow for grocery bargain hunting through participatory sensing. We utilize two-dimensional barcode decoding to automatically identify grocery products, as well as localization techniques to automatically pinpoint store locations. We show that an incentive scheme is inherently ingrained into our query/response protocol, and we suggest self-regulating mechanisms for preserving data integrity. As a result, we demonstrate that money-saving price comparisons can be conducted among brick and mortar grocery stores without the explicit cooperation of the stores.