Quantifying Agent Strategies under Reputation

Our research proposes a simple buyer/seller game that captures the incentives dictating the interaction between peers in resource trading peer-to-peer networks. We prove that for simple reputation-based buyer strategies, a seller’s decision whether to cheat or not is dependent only on the length of its transaction history, not on the particular actions committed. Given a finite number of transactions, a peer can compute a utility optimal sequence of cooperations and defections. With the limited information provided by many reputation systems, a peer has incentive to defect on a large fraction of its transactions. If temporal information is used, equilibrium is reached when peers predominantly cooperate.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: P2P
• Authors: Sergio Marti, Hector Garcia-Molina
• Keywords: P2P 2005, Peer-to-Peer Computing, Simple Buyer/seller Game, Simple Reputation-based Buyer, Trading Peer-to-peer Networks