Economic Behavior of Peer-to-Peer Storage Networks
Andrew C. Fuqua, Dan S. Wallach · 2003
Peer-to-peer networks introduce a new area of interplaybetween computer science and economics. Designers of such systems must firmly understand the incentives, pref-erences, and decision space of participating agents in order to decide the policies and make the system func-tion as well as possible. This paper models the economic behavior of agents in a peer-to-peer storage net-work. From the model, it becomes clear that agents have single-peaked preferences for a system-wide parameterthat defines the reliability of the storage network. Consequently, the system designer may implement a mecha-nism to elicit opinions for this parameter (knowing that they will be truthfully revealed) and set the system-wide value to some socially optimal level, or agents with similar preferences may cluster together to form a p2p net-work closer to their preferences.