Do humans identify efficient strategies in structured peer-to-peer systems?

In the last years, distributed coordinator-free systems, e.g., peerto-peer systems (P2P systems), have attracted much interest among researchers and practitioners. In these systems it is difficult to motivate participants to cooperate. To this end, researchers have proposed various incentive mechanisms. In this paper we are interested in the following question: Do human beings indeed use the strategies that are rational in presence of the incentive mechanism? As humans control the agents in distributed coordinatorfree systems, e.g., the peers in peer-to-peer systems, answering this question is essential. We conduct human experiments in the context of structured P2P systems to answer it. This paper shows that humans tend to find it difficult to resort to the strategies expected by the system designer.