Abstract. This work proposes LEASE, a novel Mobile-P2P lease-based economic incentive model, in which data requestors need to pay the price (in virtual currency) of their requested data items to data-providers. In LEASE, dataproviding mobile peers lease data items to free-riders, who do not have any data items to provide, in lieu of a lease payment. Thus, LEASE not only combats free-riding, but also entices free-riders to host data items, thereby improving network connectivity due to higher peer participation. In essence, LEASE facilitates the collaborative harnessing of limited mobile peer resources for improving data availability. Our performance study shows that LEASE indeed improves query response times and data availability in Mobile-P2P networks.