The Sharing-Mart System: Digital Content Sharing, Online Auctions, and Incentives

This paper introduces Sharing-Mart (S-Mart), an online digital trading platform developed at Princeton University to perform social file sharing experiments on top of technological networks as overlays. It describes the S-Mart system, the experiments conducted, and incentivization aspects which can be investigated using S-Mart. In the first part of the paper, the S-Mart system and the experiments conducted are explained, and the economic behaviors and dynamics of package auctions run on S-Mart are described. The major experimental observation that stands out here is that Internet users are less incentivized to share content on competitive applications, whose success depends on the cooperation of other users in the system. To alleviate incentivization issues in these applications, in the second part of the paper a mathematical framework is proposed that derives user population threshold values, which hint at the necessity of a certain base population strength in SMart for co-operation to take place amongst all the users. An outline of two experiments to validate the theory is presented.