‘To Share or not to Share’ An Analysis of Incentives to Contribute in Collaborative File Sharing Environments

Abstract

this paper we take a step towards understanding the performance of incentive schemes by defining and applying an analytic model based on Schelling's Multi-Person Prisoner's Dilemma (MPD) [9]. We use both this framework and simulations to study the effectiveness of different schemes for encouraging sharing in distributed file sharing systems. We consider three such schemes: the soft-incentive, reputation-based Peer-Approved and Service-Quality, and the Token-Exchange pricing scheme