A Game Theoretic Analysis of Incentives in Content Production and Sharing over Peer-to-Peer Networks

User-generated content can be distributed at a low cost using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, but the free-rider problem hinders the utilization of P2P networks. In order to achieve an efficient use of P2P networks, we investigate fundamental issues on incentives in content production and sharing using game theory. We build a basic model to analyze non-cooperative outcomes without an incentive scheme and then use different game formulations derived from the basic model to examine five incentive schemes: cooperative, payment, repeated interaction, intervention, and enforced full sharing. The results of this paper show that 1) cooperative peers share all produced content while non-cooperative peers do not share at all without an incentive scheme; 2) a cooperative scheme allows peers to consume more content than non-cooperative outcomes do; 3) a cooperative outcome can be achieved among non-cooperative peers by introducing an incentive scheme based on payment, repeated interaction, or intervention; and 4) enforced full sharing has ambiguous welfare effects on peers. In addition to describing the solutions of different formulations, we discuss enforcement and informational requirements to implement each solution, aiming to offer a guideline for protocol designers when designing incentive schemes for P2P networks.Comment: 31 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Soft peer review: social software and distributed scientific evaluation

The debate on the prospects of peer-review in the Internet age and the increasing criticism leveled against the dominant role of impact factor indicators are calling for new measurable criteria to assess scientific quality. Usage-based metrics offer a new avenue to scientific quality assessment but face the same risks as first generation search engines that used unreliable metrics (such as raw traffic data) to estimate content quality. In this article I analyze the contribution that social bookmarking systems can provide to the problem of usage-based metrics for scientific evaluation. I suggest that collaboratively aggregated metadata may help fill the gap between traditional citation-based criteria and raw usage factors. I submit that bottom-up, distributed evaluation models such as those afforded by social bookmarking will challenge more traditional quality assessment models in terms of coverage, efficiency and scalability. Services aggregating user-related quality indicators for online scientific content will come to occupy a key function in the scholarly communication system

2 P2P or Not 2 P2P?

In the hope of stimulating discussion, we present a heuristic decision tree that designers can use to judge the likely suitability of a P2P architecture for their applications. It is based on the characteristics of a wide range of P2P systems from the literature, both proposed and deployed.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur

Shut Up and Fish: The Role of Communication when Output-Sharing is used to Manage a Common Pool Resource

Schott et al. (2007) have shown that the “tragedy of the commons” can be overcome when individuals share their output equally in groups of optimal size and there is no communication. The assignment of individuals to groups as either strangers or partners does not significantly affect this outcome. In this paper we investigate whether communication changes these results. Communication reduces shirking, increases aggregate effort and reduces aggregate rents, but only when communication groups and output-sharing groups are linked. The effect is stronger for fixed groups (the partners treatment) than for randomly reassigned groups (the strangers treatment). Performance is not distinguishable from the no- communication treatments when communication is permitted but subjects share output within groups different from the groups within which they communicate. Communication also tends to enhance the negative effect of the partnered group assignment on the equality of individual payoffs. We use detailed content analysis to evaluate the impact of various categories of communication messages on behaviour across treatments.Common pool resources; Communication; Coordination; Cooperation; Free-riding Behaviour in Teams; Partners and Strangers; Experiments

Intrahousehold Bargaining and Agricultural Technology Adoption : Experimental Evidence from Zambia

This study examines how technology adoption is determined in an intra-household bargaining process between spouses with different incentives and resource constraints. We develop a noncooperative bargaining model in which individual investments affect not only a household’s total income but also its members’ future bargaining position, which can yield Pareto-inferior outcomes. To test for possible inefficiency, we introduce rice seeds to farmers in rural Zambia and randomly distribute vouchers for transportation from the village to a miller in town to husbands and wives. The results show that the identity of the voucher recipients matters for rice seed take-up when wives choose which crop to grow on suitable plots for rice production. We also find that the voucher given to husbands is effective only when they manage the plots by themselves. Furthermore, intra-household information flows are distorted by the recipients. The heterogeneous effects and incomplete information sharing among spouses provide evidence against efficient resource pooling within the family. We present suggestive evidence that limited commitment to the production plan is a key mechanism behind strategic spousal behavior. Overall, this study highlights the importance of directly targeting individuals with productive resources relevant to a technology.This study was financially supported by JSPS KAKENHI No. 16H02733.http://www.grips.ac.jp/list/jp/facultyinfo/kijima-yoko

Stewardship of the evolving scholarly record: from the invisible hand to conscious coordination

The scholarly record is increasingly digital and networked, while at the same time expanding in both the volume and diversity of the material it contains. The long-term future of the scholarly record cannot be effectively secured with traditional stewardship models developed for print materials. This report describes the key features of future stewardship models adapted to the characteristics of a digital, networked scholarly record, and discusses some practical implications of implementing these models. Key highlights include: As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Past stewardship models were built on an "invisible hand" approach that relied on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections. Future stewardship of the evolving scholarly record requires conscious coordination of context, commitments, specialization, and reciprocity. With conscious coordination, local stewardship efforts leverage scale by collecting more of less. Keys to conscious coordination include right-scaling consolidation, cooperation, and community mix. Reducing transaction costs and building trust facilitate conscious coordination. Incentives to participate in cooperative stewardship activities should be linked to broader institutional priorities. The long-term future of the scholarly record in its fullest expression cannot be effectively secured with stewardship strategies designed for print materials. The features of the evolving scholarly record suggest that traditional stewardship strategies, built on an “invisible hand” approach that relies on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections, is no longer suitable for collecting, organizing, making available, and preserving the outputs of scholarly inquiry. As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Conscious coordination calls for stewardship strategies that incorporate a broader awareness of the system-wide stewardship context; declarations of explicit commitments around portions of the local collection; formal divisions of labor within cooperative arrangements; and robust networks for reciprocal access. Stewardship strategies based on conscious coordination involve an acceleration of an already perceptible transition away from relatively autonomous local collections to ones built on networks of cooperation across many organizations, within and outside the traditional cultural heritage community

Small Is Not Always Beautiful

Peer-to-peer content distribution systems have been enjoying great popularity, and are now gaining momentum as a means of disseminating video streams over the Internet. In many of these protocols, including the popular BitTorrent, content is split into mostly fixed-size pieces, allowing a client to download data from many peers simultaneously. This makes piece size potentially critical for performance. However, previous research efforts have largely overlooked this parameter, opting to focus on others instead. This paper presents the results of real experiments with varying piece sizes on a controlled BitTorrent testbed. We demonstrate that this parameter is indeed critical, as it determines the degree of parallelism in the system, and we investigate optimal piece sizes for distributing small and large content. We also pinpoint a related design trade-off, and explain how BitTorrent's choice of dividing pieces into subpieces attempts to address it