A taxonomy of incentive patterns - the design space of incentives for cooperation
Philipp Obreiter, Jens Nimis · 2003
In ad hoc networks, devices must cooperate in order to compensate for the absence of infrastructure. Yet, autonomous devices are free to decide whether to cooperate or not. Hence, incentives are indispensable to induce cooperation between autonomous devices. Recently, several approaches have been suggested that stimulate cooperation among devices. In this report, we point out that these approaches fall short of exploiting the design space of incentives for cooperation. Therefore, we introduce incentive patterns as a means of systematically conceiving incentive schemes with respect to the specifics of the application environment. Based on economics, we derive several incentive patterns and discuss them with respect to a set of general characteristics. Consequently, we propose a taxonomy that classifies the derived incentive patterns. Lastly, we exemplify systematic design of incentive schemes in the context of our DIANE project.