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| Type | Working Paper |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Work Accounting Mechanisms: Theory and Practice |
| Organization Unit |
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| Authors |
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| Language |
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| Series Name | Harvard University |
| Number | 1 |
| Date | 2011 |
| Abstract Text | The Internet has enabled a new paradigm of economic production, where individual users per- form work for others, often in small units, for short periods of time, and without formal contracts or monetary payments. These distributed work systems can arise in many places, for example in peer-to-peer (P2P) ¯le-sharing networks, in ad-hoc wireless routing networks, or in 3G content distribution systems. The particular challenge is to incentivize users to perform work for others, even though all interactions are bilateral and monitoring is not possible. In this paper, we formal- ize the problem of designing incentive-compatible work accounting mechanisms that measure the net contributions of users, despite relying on voluntary reports. We describe a fully distributed accounting mechanism called BarterCast and introduce the Drop-Edge extension which re- moves any incentive for a user to make misreports about its own interactions. We prove that the information loss necessary to achieve this incentive compatibility is small and vanishes in the limit as the number of users grows. In some domains, users may be able to cheaply create fake identities (i.e, sybils) and use those to manipulate the accounting mechanism. A striking negative result is that no sybil-proof accounting mechanism exists if one requires responsiveness to a single positive report. To evaluate the welfare properties of BarterCast+DropEdge, we ¯rst present results from a discrete, round-based simulation, showing that the mechanism achieves very high e±ciency. We have also implemented the mechanism in Tribler, a BitTorrent software client, that is al- ready deployed in the real world and has thousands of users. Experimental results using Tribler demonstrate that the mechanism successfully prevents free-riding in P2P-¯le-sharing systems, and achieves better e±ciency than the standard BitTorrent protocol. |
| Official URL | http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/%7Eseuken/publications/AccountingMechanisms_Seuken10.pdf |
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