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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.
In the most recent Scientific American (I just got it in the mail a couple weeks ago; I don't know if it's on the stands yet), there is a long detailed article about this exactly. The article covers a lot of examples and guesses a lot on the reasons for the behavior.
I would say he is.
What, then, is the source of this urge to "punish" freeloaders? Could it be the resentment of the brutish toward the clever? Where was most of the hostility toward the peer-to-peer file-sharing masses emanating form, if not form the hard-working, tech-ignorant, "ordinary joe" segment of society, so brainwashed into spending their hard-earned dollars on Backstreet Boys CD's that they saw the rise of Gnutella, Kazaa, and Audiogalaxy as a threat to their very beings?
And so, like Socrates being forced to chugalug that hemlock forty, those responsible for file-sharing software find themselves on the business end of some truly fierce lawsuits. The stoop-browed, grunting element of humanity is, as is its nature, attempting yet again, to crush those more ingenious than themselves, through raw force. When will they learn? When will they learn?
This "game" sounds like a development of one which I read in The Economist a few years ago.
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.
That's not such a bad idea. On Gnutella for example, freeloaders are more and more becoming the bane of Gnutella. They are getting their music, but not contributing anything back, bogging down the network, and making the entire thing less enjoyable for everyone.
While punishing freeloaders seems intuitive, this study does, as you say, give creedence to the idea that people with lots of music should have the ability to punish those that do not share music on the Gnutella network.
Could this possibly also be the grounds for figuring out why certain open source projects fail and others succeed? Or is there another reason for that?
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Actually, this article is very realevent to a weblog. You can give the paying members extra power and resistance from punnishment impossed by others. K5's Scoop is currently the best weblog software that I know about (slash sucks majorly), so lets use it as an example. Under scoop you could give paying members the following bonuses without messing up the works too much:
1) Ability to read invisible posts (posts rated below 1).
2) Your own posts do not become invisible until (a) they have been rated below 0.5 (instead of 1) and (b) they have at least 3 zero ratings.
3) You get trusted user access easier (ability to rate posts as zero).
4) Your story submissions have an easier time getting posted.
5) Your votes on story submissions count as two or three votes.
You might even give them a little more editorial power, like the abiltiy to delete their own comments.
Anyway, none of these things are two extream, but they might be enough to get some subscribers.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
People will pay to punish - suggesting that their
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.
You don't need to kick users off. You just need to make the contributing users get some side benifits.
Example: more and more people are having upload quotas imposed on them (say via dorm networking). You could make the P2P software respect this to make it easier for these epople to contribute, but also make it reserve much of the upload quota for people who have contributed in the past. Thus contributing users would have a much easier time downloading things.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I definately agree with you and have seen examples of this on IRC. A few weeks ago when the FBI busted all those warez servers, traffic died down quite a bit. I read somewhere that they found out the reason for this wasn't necessarily because people were afraid to serve, but because there were only a few people that basically served a lot that everyone else mooched off of, and those were the people that got busted.
On the other hand, though, I think there are other reason for not contributing. Case in point (switching gears somewhat to Morpheus), I have Morpheus running ALL THE TIME on a DSL connection. But when I want to surf the web or download something, all those downloads kill my bandwidth. For this reason, I've set the maximum number of users that can download off of me at one time to 1, and the maximum bandwidth allowed for that to about 3.5kb/s. Now, I'm not using my computer all the time and I don't have a problem with allowing more users and more bandwidth when I'm not, but it's such a hassle to change the settings every time I want to step away from my computer and every time I come back. So, it stays at 1 user at 3.5kb/s.
But, if there was a better program that would, say, allow 10 users at a time and my max bandwidth whenever the screensaver came on, and then brought it back down to 1 user for 3.5kb/s (Morpheus allows resuming, so the cancelled downloads could connect again later) when the screensaver went off (i.e. I'm using the computer), then I would have no problem letting people download to their heart's content.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is, sometimes contributing is beyond the convenient means of some people. Mayhaps a system (in general, not necessarily a warez system) where contributing was easier, or maybe even somewhat, if not mostly, transparent, would see fewer freeloaders and more people contributing.
No sig for you.
Taoists would say that a wise man who REALLY groks his own self-interest does not seek to raise himself above the others, since by so doing he invites attack.
Imagine two people acting like this, one a Machiavellian, the other a Taoist. Both end up contributing to and sharing in the common good in an objectively equivalent way: their behaviour is indistinguishable. Although their motivations and perspectives may be different, they are each wise enough to know that their best chance at "happiness" lies in serving the community.
I don't see how you can really call this selfishness. It is a balancing act between investment/sacrifice and profit/reward. Selfishness and wisdom are at odds, here.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
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.
True - but her model works even better. The semi-strong often utilise their strength in numbers to take the strongest players out of the game, thus allowing themselves a shot at winning. Co-operating ceases to function when in conjunction with competition. And, the vast majoriy of the world's economic powers are based on competetive models.
There is a lot in this book:
Axelrod, Robert: The Evolution of Cooperation
which is relevant to this discussion and also to how open source development works, particularly if you read it alongside Eric Raymond's stuff.
I don't necessarily think that EVERYONE in society will contribute if given the tools to do so. I'm not even sure if a majority would. I think that the reason we have got to where we are in our "democratic experiment" is that people believe the world is too difficult to undertand, and they give up control to the experts.
The experts, of course, make their living making up arcana that nobody else can understand, developing opaque vocabularies and rituals, and generally placing themselves in a superior position because they think nobody could ever understand what they do. (Personally, I think economists are the worst of the bunch. Invisble Hand my ass!)
Experts will vigorously defend the barricades of their specialties from anyone who tries to connect their knowledge domain to a neighbouring one in an attempt to put together a bigger picture. We end up with a proliferation of narrowly-focused knowledge that doesn't lead to a general improvement of our "common knowledge".
The wall between "the sheep" and "the elite" is a figment of our collective imagination. Unfortunately, mass delusion is the fundamental basis of what is "real". Our world view is who we are, and vice versa. Ergo, we must shift the paradigm in order to change the world.
The main road block here is the process of buy-in. Things only get interesting when we reach a discontinuity... when everyone suddenly accepts what until that time has been "crazy". This is why revolutions are a boot-strap process: you have to convince a small core to believe your crazy idea, then send them to infect more people with the radical meme, and so on. I believe we have enough historical examples to support me on this one.
From my world view, all of our social conventions (including governments and economies) are built on ideas, which exist in the domain of chaos. So where does that leave us? We need only open our eyes and see that anarchy is the natural state of social being, and quit pretending we don't create our own world.
It's just a big human game. It really is.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
And while I don't agree that this "freeloading" is a bad thing*, I think that the case of a single app is not what the article author was getting at.
Where this model is relevant is for open-source development. When you release free code (free as in beer), it becomes part of the resource pool available to all developers. However, cooperation in this way does not flourish, unless we find a way to punish freeloaders, i.e. those who use free code but do not contribute.
And we've found one. Its called the GPL, and should (if it ever gets upheld in court) force those who want to use free (as in speech) code to contribute.
indecision
* even the most non-active user still contributes by adding to download stats if nothing else and therefore providing an indicator of how popular an app is
There is realy cool Direct Connect clients for linux. DCTC http://ac2i.tzo.com/dctc/ and CCCP http://members.chello.se/hampasfirma/cccp/ they are ultimate freeloading applications though.
Interesting that this post should come up at the same time that "Beautiful Mind" is in the theaters
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.
I wouldn't idealize a system where the majority punishes the freeloaders. Remember that the majority also defines
/Jan
what it sees as freeloaders. National socialism comes to mind. The Nazis "decided" that jews were effectively "freeloading", as they were holders of power and wealth, and were percieved as never giving back to the community. Hence the term (loosely translated from Danish) "mass-tyrany".
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
Really - what is their positive contribution to the system?
As far as i can see, the only positive side of freeloaders is:
- They spread the word - thus bringing more users to the system, even some that aren't freeloaders
- They might stop being freeloaders (for example: a person that starts with nothing to share but shares what he/she gets)
- It feels good to "just share"
Number 1 just adds speed to how fast new users find the system (those which are not freeloaders also "spread the word").For number 2, if a P2P system allows some sort of "punishment" against freeloaders while at the same time leting them know WHY they are being "punished" probably the number of freeloaders that are "converted" would actually increase.
For number 3, it feels even beter to share when you know that the persons that get stuff from you will share it further.
As i see it, less freeloaders means more bandwith for everybody else.
but I read an interesting article on a related subject the other day. (I thought it was in Scientific American, but couldn't find it on their site.)
The gist of the study was that people have a natural tendency (apparently) to look for fairness in interactions. They took pairs of people and gave one of them $10. This person was asked to offer as much of the money to the other person as they wanted. The second person could choose to accept or reject the offer. If accepted, both people would keep the money they had but if rejected neither could keep anything. Obviously, whatever the second person received would be free money, so logically (one would think) it's in their interest to accept whatever is offered, even if it's just a penny. But what the researchers found is that this is not what happens - instead, the second person would reject offers deemed insufficient. They ran this experiment in a number of places so that they could control for cultural differences, etc. There were cultural differences (in some places the offerer would actually offer more than half the money to the second person) but they consistently found that there was a limit below which people would reject the offer - apparently viewing it as unfair.
If I remember where I found it I'll add a link, if possible, in a later post.
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313
And this problem manifested itself in the case study of censorware.org. Many people offered well-meaning advice to simply let Michael Sims defect on us all without any corresponding action (that is, completely ignore all the damage and broken links and misdirection caused by his destroying censorware.org). I understand the nice-person reasoning behind this advice. But I always thought it was deeply flawed in a game-theoretic sense.
Now remember, a negative response costs both parties. And we're dealing with human beings, not program strategies. It's very tempting to avoid the moral hit associated with initiating a negative response. I've gotten many a comment that I lessen myself, I lower my reputation, by discussing
What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
I'm not blind to that. But in game-theory terms, I'm paying the cost myself of responding to a defection. It's important to do it, even at a cost.
Where things get even worse, though, is "the power of journalism" problem. Which is basically, what if someone can't respond?. What do you do if you're a programmer, and a journalist defects on you? Sometimes a workable response is to get some other journalist to champion your cause, but that's not something to rely upon. And even if so, that tends not to hurt the defecting journalist anywhere near as much as the defecting journalist can hurt the programmer. This is why I keep wrestling with the problem.
Ayn Rand would be rolling over in her grave over this. It was precisely because the rational investor would see that by investing, they'd succeed, that every rational investor would succeed.
It is when punishment is applied that people don't invest or take part. In areas heavily tested, punishment causes slacking off.
What economic advancement there is is largely due to those risk takers who do invest and drag the rest of us neanderthals along with them, kicking and screaming, into higher productivity worlds where more and more goods are available at cheaper costs.
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
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.
This is why copyright is supposed to be limited to a short period. If if still were, the system would work as intended. Much the same with patents (which originally had a longer term, because of they're supposed to represent a physical device, with the additional associated costs). The flaw is not in the basic concept, but in it's perversion by our government.
The participants considered their having punished someone--and the resultant feeling of power--to be a "profit" more valuable than real profit, just as the majority of "participants" in "real life" do.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Let's see... freeloaders use up the service without contributing. And you think it's a bad thing to get rid of them because if you do, then "there goes your userbase." But if you kick these people off you GAIN: more bandwidth, more room for people that contribute to the service. On top of that, a certain portion of potential freeloaders will be more likely to contribute if they find out they are in danger of being kicked off the service, thereby increasing the value of your service even more.
As long as it is made very easy to contribute to a service, you should not lose any meaningful users.
"And like that
Is it an issue of fairness or an issue of trust?
Do I trust the other group to do the same for me? Would I trust them to pay me more if they had the chance?
If the answer is no, then I will concede the extra buck and take $2. If the answer is yes, then I will take the extra dollar and expect that the other group, when given the situation, will do the same for me.
If you don't buy the trust then maybe it's not so much fairness but unfairness. "Why should I take less than some other group?" More wealth equals higher status. We all know this - it's kind of like trying to "keep up with the Joneses" sort of situation.
Let's say the issue was between something else, say computers. The choice is between two very decent brand XYZ (insert your own, high-quality) systems (say a 1.5GHz chip, 512MB RAM, etc.) that are perfectly acceptable for everyday use and will last 4 years. Or, you can get a 2GHz chip, 1GB RAM, 60GB HD and the other group would get a dual 3GHz, 4GB RAM, multiple hard drive beast. The rational person in me wants the 2GHz box... but the geek in me really wants the dual proc box.. and the geek also knows that all the recipients of the dual machine will brag endlessly upon how much theirs 'roxx0r'. So I settle for the 1.5GHz box and we're all the same.
It reminds me of the old joke:
Bob is sitting in his house one day when he hears his doorbell ring. He answers the door and there's a man with a suit holding a large wooden box with a big red button on the top. The man explains that the moment Bob presses the button he will receive $1,000,000 - and someone he never met will die. The man leaves the box with Bob and repeats the conditions. Bob goes back in to his easy chair and stares at the box but decides that killing someone is just too much for him to bear, and puts it in the closet. A couple of months later Bob remembers the box. So, he goes back to the closet and retrieves the box. He then hesitantly presses the button. Immediately his doorbell rings. Bob goes to the door and surprise; it is the same man in the suit who brought Bob the box. This time, however, instead of holding a box he has an oversized cashiers check for $1,000,000 made out to Bob. Bob takes the check, but before he can close the door the man asks Bob for the box with the button on it. Bob fetches the box and hands it to the man and asks him what he is going to do with the box. The man replies "I'm going to give it to someone you've never met."
Thanks,
--
Matt
I read this article in Sci Am a couple of weeks ago, and it got me thinking of an alternate experiment (which I should probably email the people who did the experiment in the first place to see if they thought of it).
In the game in the experiment, users are allowed to punish freeloaders by paying a tax. This system obviously sucks for a variety of reasons if implemented on a network of a large scale.
What I was wondering is what happens when you play the same game, except instead of punishing, you allow people to pay a tax to *reward* the people who are fronting up money? The results would probably vary wildly depending on how high the reward was...
Aside from the more scalable architecture offered by napster and fasttrack in comparison to gnutella they also had a major advantage in user/freeloader ratios.
I'd guess that 90% of napster users went with the default installations that allowed the client programs to scan their hard drives and automatically share all mp3s. Furthermore, I'd guess that a similar ration never had any siginificant cognition about the FT or napster clients continuing to run as background processes when they 'exited' the program.
Gnutella has a real reputation as a freeloaders network and it's not surprising. Many of the clients do not stay running when you close them (and even if something like LimeWire did, I'm loathe to have a huge chunk of memory taken up by a bloated JRE). Furthermore, a lot of the clients don't do a good job of making it extra work to *not* share your files. In the original gnutella client for windows as well as current incarnations of gtk-gnutella, you have to explicitly enter the config screen and tell the program which directories you want to share. For a lot of people with weak ethics or concepts of fair exchange that extra step is just enough to give them an excuse to be a leetch on the network.
It is intriguing to see what happens as more and more clients are punishing freeloaders in even the most rudimentary fashion. For instance, Limewire now has an option that will allow you to set preferences against those sharing less than a specific number of files. This in theory should encorage people to share their directories especially as the controls become more fine-grained and reward those sharing large collections/bandwidth with preferred access in exchange for offering their services to the network.
It's a little less cumbersome, if also a little less elegant and perfect, than the mojo nation system of a credit based economy. However, as in the curren tstate of most p2p, it is potentially missing the bigger picture by concentrating only on the health of the community qua community and ignoring the potential problems of freeloading within the scope of society. Namely, rewarding artists for their work.
P2P gains some respect if you accept the arguments that it encourages more CDs or concert tickets to be purchased, and thus greater rewards to the artists. This is no doubt true for many, however there are also plenty of people who haven't bought an album since they got broadband,a nd these people are gaining unfairly on the goodwill of thsoe who do have a sense of ethics on fair exchange with artists.
What I'd like to see is a similar system to the idea of giving preferential bandwidth to those who share that is integrated with sites like fairtunes. It seems possible that a p2p protocol could be developed or extended to check a user who is requesting a download for tokens representing 'tips' that they have made at fairtunes in exchange for the pleasure they have received for downloaded music. It would definitely add some overhead to the protocol to authenticate the tokens against a fairtunes server and/or public key, however offering perferential performance on the network would serve as a gentle pressure to encourage a more ethical, and arguably a more sustainable, system which artists would have less trepidation of participating in and may very well be able to earn reasonable incomes from if their music is enjoyed by enough people.
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