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Cooperation Works if Majority Can Punish Freeloaders
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.
I know its funny, but this actually applies.
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
Play with my webcams and lights here
I seem to remember a statistic back in the old napster days that the majority of the people were freeloaders e.g. they just downloaded without offering anything themselves.
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
Well, spammers have the opposite situation, a small cost for them (sending 10000 copies of the same mail) costs much more to others (bandwidth, time reading and deleting junk).
The correct application of this work (although not to the letter) would be to 'punish' those who spam us with lawsuits such as is allowed in Washington State. Although it is a personal cost to call ISPs, file suits and such, if everyone were to make such small pains, we would all benefit greatly.
Then of course next there would be the freeloaders who do nothing to help but profit from our spam-eradicating work that need to be punished ....
> 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.
Yes it is. But strangely in the article, it seems to suggest that the "societies" under test were constantly being changed so that people could not learn the trustworthiness or investment habits of others in the group. That seems counter-intuitive because as you say above, the benefits of the system are reaped only after several iterations.
I also think that the headline poster was wrong about the potential implications of this:
1) Open Source software development is by definition a producer/consumer system. The point is that freeloading is allowed - in fact, necessary! What would be the point in a load of hackers writing the Linux kernel if loads of people didn't download it? End users don't have to contribute back to the pool; that's why they are so called.
2) Peer to peer networks, on the other hand, do not necessarily have a means of production in the first place. You might be able to ease bandwidth troubles etc. by punishing those who do more "clienting" than serving, but there's no sense in punishing those who download more than they upload. I'd say it's almost inevitable that that will be the case for most file-sharing systems.
In the case of online music distribution (for example), what's needed is a way to punish those who take but don't create. The current system (at least, pre-copy-protected-CDs) of "you don't pay, you don't listen" has at least the merits of logic and fairness.
Still states the obvious tho'.
These sigs are more interesting tha
In the case of file sharing, this is an interesting proposition. How (and why) do you punish someone when the resource is not scarce?
Money, food and other physical resources are scarce by nature, but files and information are infinitely copyable; the exact opposite.
Limewire tries to do something like this, where you can refuse connections from clients that are not sharing a certain minimum number of files. The "punishment" being that you are locked out of the rich parts of network because you are not sharing your files.
Wether making a network smaller by punitive measures is beneficial to the whole community is another question. The dynamics of filesharing are different from physical commodity and financial networks.
There will always be "leeches". When there is nothing to loose by letting them exist and leech, and where the machines they run expand the network simply by being connected to it, its probably better to keep them included and un-punished, rather than decrease the size of the network.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
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 :-)
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.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
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.
You wrote such an idiot comment that I felt I had to answer.
I live there and I observe on a daily basis their generous and friendly nature.
Famous Swiss include Henri Dunant (Red Cross) and Alex Julliard (Wine).
Actually there have been lots of studies made after the 2nd world wart and they didn't come to your diffamatory conclusion.
Believe it or not but the Swiss are just one of the most advanced democracy on Earth and the typical comments you seem to enjoy to repeat are mostly overhyped.
Yes, there have been a few Swiss idiots, but no : it is wrong to make these exceptions a generality.
No, get a plane ticket, travel around, meet foreign people and see for yourself instead of looking like a xenophobic ignorant.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
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.
Well, if they have the power to punish someone then aren't they, by default, cooperating? Therefore, maintaining cooperation is the simple task of punishing those who are not cooperating. They cannot ignore their role in punishing defectors, because the defectors are preventing them from cooperating. That is, their desire for cooperation outweighs the cost necessary to punish those who are sabatoging the harmony, therefore they will always punish the defectors. No?
No sig for you.
I would be a bit careful with comments like that. Switzerland is not a country that harbors criminals nor do they "just take money". Also Lichtenstein is not part of Switzerland. It is an independent country. Lichtenstein and Switzerland are associated together because Lichtenstein does not want to create its own infrastructure for everything. Exactly same scenario like Monaco and France.
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.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
surely the comment moderation system used by Slashdot already provides a perfect example of this? Incidentally, wouldn't it be more sensible to allow ALL registered users mod priveleges after Xmonths or Xposts and only allow POSITIVE moderation? Surely we'd end up with a much more democratic system that didn't run the risk of "disappearing" potentially insightful posts? Just a thought.
That was classic intercourse!
I'll use a Napster-like system as an example, but when I refer to "songs", you can easily substitute "movies," or "naked pictures of Natalie Portman," or just "files."
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.