Free-riding and whitewashing in peer-to-peer systems

By Michal Feldman, Christos H. Papadimitriou, John Chung-I Chuang, Ion Stoica. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2004

538 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We devise a model to study the phenomenon of free-riding and free-identities in peer-to-peer systems. At the heart of our model is a user of a certain type, an intrinsic and private parameter that reflects the user's willingness to contribute resources to the system. A user decides whether to contribute or free-ride based on how the current contribution cost in the system compares to her type. We study the impact of mechanisms that exclude low type users or, more realistically, penalize free-riders with degraded service. We also consider dynamic scenarios with arrivals and departures of users, and with whitewashers -users who leave the system and rejoin with new identities to avoid reputational penalties. We find that imposing penalty on all users that join the system is effective under many scenarios. In particular, system performance degrades significantly only when the turnover rate among users is high. Finally, we show that the optimal exclusion or penalty level differs significantly from the level that optimizes the performance of contributors only for a limited range of societal generosity levels.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Computer Networks and Communications, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2108dba8487ebcd8689f1ed7b261feed654e65d

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Citations in the corpus

BAR fault tolerance for cooperative services (2005, background): “Game theory [25] has a long history in the economics literature [4, 28, 41] and has recently become of general interest in computer science [3, 20, 22, 23, 45, 48, 61].”
Taxonomy of trust: Categorizing P2P reputation systems (2006, background): “have done extensive work in analyzing the problem of stranger policies and whitewashing in P2P networks [21,19,38].”
Incentives for Mobile Crowd Sensing: A Survey (2016, background): “P2P networks [74], where users tend to consume the resource without contribution.”
Traveling the silk road: a measurement analysis of a large anonymous online marketplace (2012, background): “In other words, there is suspicion of a “whitewashing attack [12],” whereby a seller creates an excellent reputat ion, before using that reputation to defraud users and leave the system.”
Reputation-based incentive protocols in crowdsourcing applications (2011, background): “Finally and most importantly, the current pricing schemes cannot solve the social dilemma existing between workers and requesters: if the payment of a task is ex-ante, which means that the requester pays before the task starts, a worker always has the incentive to take the payment and provides no ef”