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Cooperation Works if Majority Can Punish Freeloaders
Posted by
michael
on Thu Jan 10, 2002 03:17 AM
from the cooperate-or-die dept.
from the cooperate-or-die dept.
plasmid writes: "Some Swiss economists ran an investment game... they found that if the majority could punish freeloaders, cooperation flourished. I think this has implications for cooperative peer-to-peer systems and, to a lesser extent, for open source development. I'm so inspired I plan to go out an punish someone right now, as a matter of fact." I had just read this article the other day (go memepool), so this Nature piece seems oddly apropos.
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Cooperation Works if Majority Can Punish Freeloaders
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Re:Damn (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it. If you have one large server that everyone tries to download from without others participating, several problems emerge. First of all, you saturate the bandwidth on that connection. Secondly, with limited resources, it takes much longer for everyone to obtain what they're wanting. And when the server is located by authorities and shut down, a major resource is lost.
Now, have everyone serve. Anyone looking for something can always find it, because its everywhere. They can always get it, because no one server is oversaturated, as the load is spread out. If one or even several servers get shut down, the effect is minimal. Everyone benefits when everyone cooperates and nobody is hit too harshly.
Now we have another form of potential punishment in this case, not from those that participate, but from law enforcement. Law enforcement, unlike the traders, is more likely to go after those who DO participate, and the freeloaders will get off scott free.
-Restil
Funny they should say that (Score:5, Funny)
Swiss - Sit back and watch the rest of the world fight tyranny and just rake the money in wherever and however it was attained
Economists - Earn money based on pseudo-science and predictions which are as reliable as those gained by examining chicken entrails.
Therefore should'nt we just punish Swiss Economists
Re:Funny they should say that (Score:5, Insightful)
Back to Switzerland. Let me put into terms that maybe you can understand (assuming you live in the US). In the US there is freedom of speech. That means I can say things like ni...r and be part of the KKK. Many countries do not accept this behavior, but the US defends it. And I agree with it as well. But freedom of speech is a double edge sword as showin in the KKK example since it is racist.
In Switzerland privacy is very much like the US freedom of speech. This means everything is private and all personal information is strictly guarded. I like that as well because I do not want everyone to know what I do. However, the Swiss do not harbor criminals. Lets say if a drug lord did put his money in Switzerland. If another country can prove that the drug lord is a criminal then the Swiss will lock the accounts. But the Swiss will not simply lock the accounts on a "hunch" that the person is a criminal. Nor will they give out information "on a hunch". Privacy is treated like freedom of speech and like freedom of speech it is a double edged sword.
Privacy & the Swiss constitution (Score:4, Informative)
1 All persons have the right to receive respect for their private and family life, home, and secrecy
of the mails and telecommunications.
2 All persons have the right to be protected against the abuse of personal data.
http://www.eda.admin.ch/washington_emb/e/home/l
-s
P2P and freeloaders... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if we apply this swiss theory to p2p applications you know what will happen?
1) if the majority of the users are freeloaders then there is little chance that they are going to kick other freeloading users off the service
2) assuming that only contributors to the community get a vote then they will be faced with a massive task of getting rid of the freeloaders
3) once you lose all the freeloaders you are left with the people who adopted early and helped the service become massive, but you will have lost the majority of the userbase
4) once a service gets a bad reputation it sticks, and since these services gain popularity through word of mouth rather than regular channels you lose a lot of the potential users
5) lastly a particular p2p service may be good but there are a large number of services which are just as good and which wouldn't support this concept of co-operation.
Just my 2c
similar to Prisoner's dilemma non-zero sum game (Score:5, Informative)
A similar set of ideals has been previously applied in psychological and darwinian non-zero sum games where there is a reduced personal gain but higher group gain from cooperation. These games challenge participants in finding an optimal outcome for both in cases where there are multiple iterations of choices to cooperate or 'defect' from cooperation - the website details only a new variant of these.
One model is that of the cold war. If both countries cooperate in an arms reduction treaty, they both win some, but for the individual country, a win can be made if their competitor cooperates and they 'defect' and build more arsenal.
This game has a matrix of possible points scored by each side depending on their individual choices.
. . . . . coop . . defectcoop . . . 3,3 . . 5,0
defect . . 0,5 . . 1,1
In the above situation, the two scores delimited by commas indicate the score for each country. If the countries both cooperate, each receives three points. However, if they disagree, one country will win, but the sum score is less. The interesting situation is if both defect - the value placed on these scores may also determine how the game is played through multiple iterations by two players.
Another variant is the prisoner's dilemma [brembs.net] game. Two criminals are captured, and the DA will cut one of them a deal if they squeal on the other. Of course, if both squeal on each other, both loose big. If both are quiet, they will get a lesser charge. The dilemma is that the best group outcome is that they will both fare better if they are both quiet, but they don't know what the other will do.
The article listed is similar to this, but different that there is a cost involved in punishing the 'bad' player that doesn't pay into the investment pot. Here the game asks you to punish the uncooperative player with costs now, but the punishment might make them more likely to contribute in future rounds of the game. Interesting.
Or why not just d/l the relevant bit as pdf... (Score:4, Informative)
Antecedents of this game (Score:3, Interesting)
In that, the idea was a group of people had 10 beans , of which some were added to the pot and the rest were kept by the participant. At the end, the he pot was shared amongst all, and the goal was to maximise the indivuduals holding (with no concept of punishment).
This was carried out at a university (where else?) and it found that while students of most disciplines did the same thing, kept five and shared five, (only) students of economics kept 9 and shared 1. The summary of The Economist wondered whether this was cause or effect of studying economics.
I wonder if people like Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, ESR et al would keep 1 and share 9, and whether Bill Gates and co would behave more like economists.
NewScientist has an article as well. (Score:3, Informative)
If the other sources somehow become slashdotted, NewScientist [newscientist.com] also has an article up on this.
It's up under the title "Anger plays key role in human cooperation" [newscientist.com].
--R
Reminds me of an experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations.
This quote reminds me of an experiment. It runs something like this: A group of people is divided into two groups of equal size. Then each group is asked this simple question: We will either give both groups $2 per person or we'll give each of you three bucks and each of them four bucks. What would you prefer?
85% of the participants go for the two bucks.
The functional principal of a working Anarchy (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an example of what most elites have nightmares about... the "masses" deciding for themselves what to do, through concensus and free exchange of information. This is the horrible, to-be-avoided-at-all-costs thing that many refer to as "too much democracy". The key is this: it only works if those with an interest/stake both get a place at the table and the ability to punish people who waste their time with lies and greed.
I'm convinced this kind of democratic, community-oriented "anarchy" could work at any scale. As long as everyone feels they are part of something meaningful, and that everyone else is taking it seriously, then you can actually get "competitors" to agree on strategies to maximize the Common Good.
A major stumbling block has been the desire to "punish" criminals by sending them into isolation (or rather, creating isolated COMMUNITIES of criminals), instead of focusing on a more "healing" punishment which would require the community to confront, shame, and supervise the trangressors's rehabilitation.
For example, look at the pyros in Australia. Doesn't it just sound right that they should walk through the destruction, meet their victims, and generally confronted the effects of their crimes? Is it really better to lock them away where they can learn how to hate society even more? How can they be accepted into society again if they aren't genuinely seeking to make reparations?
Just like laughter--a social sanction against rigid codes of behaviour--punishment should bring people together. As weird as that sounds, everyone has to share in the duties of rewarding and punishing members of society: the only way to find a common good is to have everyone agree on it. Don't let anyone tell you that you should leave it to the "smarter/better" people to make this decision for everone else. What is best for those with privilege and power is not necessarily best for all.
Flawed research: getting what you look for ... (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Punishment is a purely selfish strategy: spend money punishing someone, so they will invest more, so your profits increase. All this shows is that the people playing the game were able to come up with vaguely intelligent long term (selfish) strategies.
If they wanted to prove that people will 'pay to punish', they should have setup the system where the cost of punishing someone was so high that overall profits decreased - and seen how long people kept on punishing.
a bit more subtle than that... (Score:5, Interesting)
Punishment is a purely selfish strategy: spend money punishing someone, so they will invest more, so your profits increase.
Incorrect - In the actual experiment, if you chose to punish a `freeloader' then you paid out of your own profits, and no one else's. The games were not iterated (played repeatedly with the same cast of players), so any consequent change in the freeloader's behavior would not be to your benefit. Perhaps on the next time around, the freeloader would have a change of heart, but even if s/he did this was not likely to be to your own benefit.
Thus in the context of the game, choosing to punish was a very counter-selfish act - not selfish at all, but quite the opposite. That's what makes the research so interesting.
-Renard
Punishing all you slashdot lurkers (Score:5, Funny)
censorware.org as a case study - SERIOUS (Score:4, Troll)
I've been wrestling with the article's issue, on a game-theoretic level, for years. For example, many people simply do not understand what I say when I discuss the events and aftermath of
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]
It's far deeper than ego or "personal", which are superficial reactions I get. In game-theory, the Prisoner's Dilemma [constitution.org] teaches us that that individuals have an incentive to defect in terms of cooperative resources. Now, having said that, what then? What follows? How does one go about organizing a cooperative venture with this knowledge in mind?
To quote the article:
This is the exact argument I made passionately regarding the necessity of making there be some penalty for Michael Sims' actions in destroying censorware.org. It's the flip side of enlightened self-interest. Cooperation cannot be supported if someone can defect without penalty. But:
Indeed. It's not costless to create downsides. This makes it tempting to ignore their role in maintaining cooperation. They're unpleasant, to say the least.But what if it's nigh-impossible to have a penalty? This is an aspect where I think about "the power of journalism". As a programmer who has worked with journalists (many times unhappily), I'm acutely aware that as a general rule, journalists can harm me with manipulated coverage, much more than I can punish them via semi-futile protests about their actions. This is in fact my number-one publicity worry about anti-censorware work and how I'd ever get covered nowadays in Slashdot if I ever were to be sued like Dmitry Sklyarov.
So in the end, I don't have a solution. But the implications of this problem are NOT abstract, in fact are very immediate.
Basic economics theory - the lighthouse (Score:5, Interesting)
A lighthouse is for the common good, but can't exist without being charged for. However, due to its nature (it just emits light), you cannot deny service to those who don't pay - they'll see light regardless of whether they've contributed.
The dilemma is - as a ship owner, you have no incentive to pay for upkeep as the service is delivered to you anyway. This works right up until the moment the lighthouse has to close, at which point it becomes in your best interest to ensure everyone pays. Note that - everyone, not just you. If only you pay, you're still at a disadvantage.
Can't remember the exact terminology they used - I think it's a form of 'free good', but I'm prepared to be corrected on that. Why these researchers felt the need to reprove a very old and established theory is beyond me.
Cheers,
Ian
PS: 'A'-Levels - the exams in the UK taken when you're about 18.
On democracy and the Nash equilibrium (Score:3, Interesting)
The finding of the Swiss Economists is close to the very premise of pure democracy and why forms of it have by-and-large overcome monarchic states. Combined with the assumption that game theory and John Nash's work is based on(see Beautiful Mind -- or better, read his research) "that equilibrium can be predicted when you take into account that each player acts in his/her own self interest", you have good theoretical evidence supporting the findings of this research.[Actually both Game-theory and Nash tend to start with the presumption that people will act in their own self-interest first and foremost]
In order for the majority to have the power to punish freeloaders, they must first have power to begin with. With majority vote and regular turnover, the opportunity to enact this is provided for. If everyone acts in their own self interest and they have the power to vote, then freeloaders MUST be punished.
If the majority are freeloaders, then those that contribute least will be punished. (Napster is shut down, but everyone who knows how to contribute still has access by some means). If this "freeloader" society is self-sufficient, it will eventually turn itself around if it is interested in self-survival. In the case of government, democracies turn themselves around because the cost of non-cooperation is death. Napster and p2p are bad examples becase the cost of community-death is not as dire as individual-death.
The summary of this rant: community works if either 1) the act of cooperation is equivalent to the act of acting in the majority's self-interest and/or 2) acting in the majority's self-interest does not lead to the destruction of the community. True democracy allows for consistent societal change in both of these directions.
Five words: G, P, L (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't see anybody at +3 making the analogy to the GPL vs. the BSD-like licenses.
In a sense, the GPL "punishes" freeloaders by denying them resources - "If you don't share with us, then we won't let you have a share of the pot." If you won't contribute to the shared codebase, you cannot take from the shared codebase.
Compare and contrast that to the BSD-like licenses that don't have the "Release the source" requirement - a freeloader (certainly Microsoft, possibly Transgaming, possibly Lindows) can take from the public pool, not give back, and incur no "punishment".
I used to think that RMS was a crazy, extremist bastard. Then something happened to cause me to revisit that thinking. I work professionally with a product called RtX, which is an X Windowing System server for the embedded operating system VxWorks. RtX is derived from XFree86. I've had several problems with RtX - it won't recognize certain graphics chips, it doesn't support font server use, it won't do anything but 256 pseudocolor, I cannot easily add key bindings or LEDs to the keyboard routines, and (most importantly) it won't work under the newer versions of VxWorks. None of these would be insurmountable problems if I had the source, but the folks that did the conversion of XFree into RtX (and it isn't a trivial conversion, not just
I know I just enraged the "GPL is tyranny, BSD is freedom" crowd. But please, think about this for a moment. If you wish to continue to use the BSD license for your code, wonderful. However, any code I do off-hours will be released under the GPL, for the reasons stated above.
This doesn't apply to software, because... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just as I'll claim if you try to use traditional economic arguments to justify "ownership" of software, or whatever, analogies between physical property (money) and property that can be duplicated (software, information) just don't hold up. The fact that you can share software or information with a friend without losing it yourself makes a HUGE difference in any kind of economic game. (There is some cost, for instance bandwidth in a peer-to-peer system, but I think it is mostly negligible.)
However, I would expect that this result does in fact hold for IP-less software economies as well. I am just saying that making direct comparisons is always trouble.
Social discovery in peer networks and cooperation (Score:3, Informative)
It is called social discovery, and it works by having each and every peer create a view of the network that suits their interests and needs. In such an environment, the freeloading peers will not be viewed as valuable peers and will be dropped from your peer group(s); no longer used, and no longer using your resources.
On the flip side, there is a strong incentive to become a better, more reliable peer yourself, as the quality of peers you can associate with is directly related to how they perceive *your* quality to them.
If you want to be able to tap better, higher quality peers, then you should keep your node available longer, more often, and also share more resources (whatever they may be).
The project I am working on that implements this social discovery mechanism is called the ALPINE Network [cubicmetercrystal.com] and there is also another social discovery based project called NeuroGrid [neurogrid.net].
I am biased towards this kind of approach, but I think it provides the best long term solution to resource discovery / searching in large peer networks.
Dead tree reference (Score:3, Informative)
My idea for a fair peer-to-peer system. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. It costs one Point to download a song from another user.
2. Users have unlimited Points for a certain trial period (some people will try to re-register every day to get around this, but that problem may or may not significant enough to affect the service).
3. Users get a certain (small) number of Points each day.
4. Each time a song is downloaded from a user, that user gets two Points. This will be the primary means of gaining Points.
5. Note that the person the song was downloaded from received two Points for the transfer, but the person who downloaded it only paid one Point. This means that the total number of Points in the universe will increase by one for each song that's transferred. This if fine -- it keeps the system from being too strict. You can take up to twice what you give, which should be generous enough for most people's tastes.
6. People who have a lot of songs to share will have many more Points than they could possibly spend. This is fine. If you're even moderately generous, you shouldn't have to worry too much about what you take.
7. Most people who generously offer the songs they have will wind up with more than enough Points. Those who DON'T offer what they have will find themselves frequently running short, and will be encouraged to start offering what they have.
8. To further motivate people to accumulate a lot of unused Points, have a "Hall of Fame" listing top Point-holders, top new Point-holders, fastest-rising Point-holders, etc. People love stats; witness the people who'll install the D.net or SETI client on 5000 computers primarily to increase their rank in the stats.
9. For further motivation, offer additional prizes for accumulating Points. Maybe a person who reaches 100,000 Points gets a T-shirt, or a person can exchange 10,000 Points for a coffee mug.
10. Who pays for the T-shirts, and the service? Users with low bandwidth who otherwise would have a hard time earning Points can earn them by an alternative method of contributing to the service: financially. Whether you make songs available to users of the service, or help the service meet its financial needs, you have to contribute to the servicein SOME way to get a significant share of songs from the service.
11. Another way to encourage people to earn large numbers of Points would be to give preferential download treatment to higher-ranked users. For example, if the person hosting a song has configured his client to only allow other users to only download 200kbit/sec from his machine, and five users try to download from him at once, the 100,000-Point user might get to download 100kbit/sec from him, the three 10,000-Point users might get 33kbit/sec each, and the 2-Point user might be forced to download from a slower host.
12. This'll not only encourage users to offer more of their songs more generously so that they can download from faster hosts than those who don't, it'll also ensure that people with slow connections will get some people downloading from them (and thus the people with the slow connections will get to earn some points too), rather than every single user swamping the fastest hosts, bogging them down until they're slower than the slowest hosts.
Ideas? Suggestions? Flaws? Discuss.
Re:Duh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Think of M$ - making billions just because they once written a not-so-good program! Isn't it freeloading.
Disclaimer: sorry for m$ reference, just couldn't resist :-)