Algorithms, games, and the internet
STOC '01 Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
A scalable content-addressable network
Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Distributed algorithmic mechanism design: recent results and future directions
DIALM '02 Proceedings of the 6th international workshop on Discrete algorithms and methods for mobile computing and communications
Pastry: Scalable, Decentralized Object Location, and Routing for Large-Scale Peer-to-Peer Systems
Middleware '01 Proceedings of the IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms Heidelberg
Self-interested automated mechanism design and implications for optimal combinatorial auctions
EC '04 Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Distributed Implementations of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Mechanisms
AAMAS '04 Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1
A survey of peer-to-peer content distribution technologies
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
EC '06 Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Computational-Mechanism Design: A Call to Arms
IEEE Intelligent Systems
Indirect partner interaction in peer-to-peer networks: stimulating cooperation by means of structure
Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Economic mechanism design for computerized agents
WOEC'95 Proceedings of the 1st conference on USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce - Volume 1
Do humans identify efficient strategies in structured peer-to-peer systems?
Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 3
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Highly distributed coordinator-free systems with many agents, such as peer-to-peer systems, are receiving much interest in research and practice. In such systems, free riding continues to be a severe and difficult problem. To reach a high degree of cooperation, researchers have proposed numerous incentive mechanisms against free riding. Our concern in turn is a more profound question: Under which circumstances do human individuals indeed resort to effective strategies in those settings? This question is important as humans control the agents. In economics, mimicking the behavior of humans is an accepted method for strategy design. In particular, this holds for complex settings where formal analyses must rely on simplifying assumptions that do not hold in reality. By means of extensive human experiments in one specific setup, namely structured P2P systems, this paper provides evidence that strategies in the settings under investigation often are the result of a non-strategic perspective. This perspective lets participants overlook obvious strategies that are effective. Further, our experiments reveal the following: Online players, i.e., individuals taking part in the system directly, intuitively tend to find better strategies than offline players, i.e., individuals who just implement agents. Offline players have difficulties predicting the strategies of others and overestimate the quality of their strategies. We conclude that a combination of 'online' and 'offline' strategy design is a cost-efficient and effective solution.