Motivating Cooperation on Peer to Peer Networks

This paper addresses the problem of free riding on peer-to-peer resource-sharing networks and explores methods for motivating more cooperative user behaviour via an adaptive interface. The paper argues that the free-riding problem is not so much an economic issue as a socio-psychological one due to a paradigm shift the user community is undergoing. Users do not yet understand that they, and all of their peers, are both clients and servers and must therefore be taught new behaviour. Our teaching strategy is based upon operant conditioning and employs the low-involvement processing model used in television advertising. Modeling the user’s interests, attitude and relationships with other users enables the interface to adapt to the individual’s cooperativeness bias and give feedback in the form of affective images.