Pricing Incentive Mechanisms for Medical Data Sharing in the Internet of Things: A Three-Party Stackelberg Game Approach

In the context of the rapid growth of the Internet of Things and mobile health services, sensors and smart wearable devices are continuously collecting and uploading dynamic health data. Together with the long-term accumulated electronic medical records and multi-source heterogeneous clinical data from healthcare institutions, these data form the cornerstone of intelligent healthcare. In the context of medical data sharing, previous studies have mainly focused on privacy protection and secure data transmission, while relatively few have addressed the issue of incentive mechanisms. However, relying solely on technical means is insufficient to solve the problem of individuals' willingness to share their data. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a three-party Stackelberg-game-based incentive mechanism for medical data sharing. The mechanism captures the hierarchical interactions among the intermediator, electronic device users, and data consumers. In this framework, the intermediator acts as the leader, setting the transaction fee; electronic device users serve as the first-level followers, determining the data price; and data consumers function as the second-level followers, deciding on the purchase volume. A social network externality is incorporated into the model to reflect the diffusion effect of data demand, and the optimal strategies and system equilibrium are derived through backward induction. Theoretical analysis and numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed mechanism effectively enhances users' willingness to share data and improves the overall system utility, achieving a balanced benefit among the cloud platform, electronic device users, and data consumers. This study not only enriches the game-theoretic modeling approaches to medical data sharing but also provides practical insights for designing incentive mechanisms in IoT-based healthcare systems.