Summary: A case for holistic incentive design
As distributed systems that span multiple administra-
tive domains proliferate, robust protocols increasingly
need to incorporate the incentives of multiple stakehold-
ers into their design. A significant challenge in designing
incentive aware systems is layering: where are incentives
required? who are the principals?
Peer-to-peer systems (P2P) push these challenges to
the limit. Users are transitory, act independently, and
strategize to maximize unknown utility functions. More-
over, users themselves are not the only players; ISPs and
IT administrators impose limits on bandwidth hungry
services. Content providers actively police P2P networks
for copyrighted material, often introducing polluted files
that merit system-level countermeasures .
In this paper, we argue for a holistic approach to in-