Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 3: Economic Models and Evolutionary Game Theory I

SOE 3.1: Talk

Monday, March 26, 2012, 11:00–11:15, H 0110

The tragedy of the commons of BitTorrent: a concrete application of agent based models — •Steve Genoud¹, Tamás Vinkó², Sergi Lozano¹, and Dirk Helbing¹ — ¹ETHZ, Zürich, Switzerland — ²TUD, Delft, The Netherlands

Peer to peer (p2p) softwares allows the creation of new cheap, decentralised and scalable means of computing. Any Skype call, for instance, rests on this technology. The BitTorrent protocol is another example of a successful implementation of p2p file-sharing.

The distribution of a load across individual users give p2p systems their strength. But this creates a situation similar to a public goods game. As producer-consumer, users are tempted to consume as much as possible, while producing nothing. Therefore the users behaviors, especially their sharing preferences, are crucial for the system performance. These aspects, especially the dynamic effects of incentives, are currently overlooked in the literature.

We propose an agent based model of BitTorrent as a techno-social system. We compose a detailed simulation of the protocol with a decision model of the agents. The resulting model should obey the macro social behavior we observe in real communities. We can use measurements of the performance of actual systems to fix the parameters of the model. Finally, we show how this framework may be used to test new protocols.