Quantum Game Analysis on Extrinsic Incentive Mechanisms for P2P Services

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) services such as mobile P2P transmissions and resource sharing, provide efficient methods to deliver data without the deployment of any central server. Nevertheless, the free-riding phenomenon inherit in such services presses a need for incentive mechanisms to stimulate contributions of data transmissions or sharing. As a result, it is imperative to answer the following questions: whether , and if so to what extent , an incentive mechanism can invoke such contributions? To answer these questions, we employ an $n$ n -player continuous quantum game model to analyze the general extrinsic incentive mechanisms as well as the reputation-based incentive mechanisms, a typical class of extrinsic incentive mechanisms. We focus on studying the extrinsic incentive mechanisms in this paper due to their wide scope of applications stemming from the fact that they promote cooperative behaviors by offering rewards rather than depending on the internal bounds (e.g., social ties) among peers, which may not always exist between any pair of peers. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to analyze the extrinsic incentive mechanisms for P2P services from a quantum game perspective. Such a perspective is adopted because the extended strategy space in the quantum game broadens the range for searching optimal strategies and the introduction of entanglement makes the proposed analytical frameworks more practical due to the consideration of the peers’ relationships imposed by the rewards in extrinsic incentive mechanisms. Our quantum game-based analytical framework is generic because it is compatible with classic game-based schemes. The analytical results can provide a straightforward insight on evaluating the potential of the extrinsic incentive mechanisms and can serve as important references for designing new extrinsic incentive mechanisms.