Asymmetric Incentives in Peer-to-Peer Systems
Key: LDHS05-1
Author: Nicolas Liebau, Vasilios Darlagiannis, Oliver Heckmann, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: August 2005
Kind: In proceedings
Book title: Proceedings of AMCIS 2005
Keywords: Peer-to-Peer, asymmetric incentives, altruistic behavior
Abstract: In most application scenarios for Peer-to-Peer systems, an incentive scheme is required in order to achieve an overall acceptable system performance. Incentive schemes motivate users to share as much as possible of their free resources, e.g. bandwidth, to the Peer-to-Peer system. Today most peers use connections of asymmetric links, such as A-DSL or cable modems. Therefore, users have significantly more download bandwidth than their available upload bandwidth. Applying this observation to incentive schemes suggests that one unit of upload bandwidth should be valued higher than one download unit. However, applying such an incentive scheme leads the economy of the system to inflation. The incentive scheme would finally collapse. However, another observed phenomenon could be capitalized to reduce the resulting effects. In Peer-to-Peer systems, some peers typically exhibit altruistic behavior. Assuming that the presence of an asymmetric incentive scheme would not affect the behavior of the altruistic peers, these peers would accumulate the waste amount of the incentive units. Thus, inflation might be avoided. Gathering the results of a detailed simulative approach, this paper shows how to balance asymmetric incentive schemes in order to avoid inflation. As an incentive scheme, a token-based accounting system is utilized providing the asymmetric exchange of tokens.

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