[p2p-research] Revisiting Social Welfare in P2P

[Michel Bauwens]

(full pdf version also available via via rrameez at gmail.com)
Revisiting Social Welfare in P2P

Report: *Revisiting Social Welfare in P2P. Rameez Rahman*, Michel
Meulpolder, David Hales, Johan Pouwelse, Henk Sips

URL = http://pds.twi.tudelft.nl/reports/2009/PDS-2009-003.pdf

INFO via rrameez at gmail.com

report number PDS-2009-003 ; Delft University of Technology, Parallel and
Distributed Systems Report Series


 [edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Revisiting_Social_Welfare_in_P2P?title=Revisiting_Social_Welfare_in_P2P&action=edit&section=1>
] Abstract

"Extensive work has been done on studying freeriding and incentivizing
cooperation in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems in general and BitTorrent in
particular. We argue for incentives from the point of view of the political
economy of P2P networks. Political economists, unlike mainstream economists,
strive to situate the study of economics in the broader realities of human
society. We invest our efforts in studying incentivizing cooperation in P2P
systems by underpinning our analysis on the disparity in Internet bandwidth
between P2P users. Consequently, we come up with a new defnition of fairness
in P2P systems, one that recognizes that there are different classes of P2P
users and seeks to be equitable to those who are less resourceful. We make
the following contributions: 1) We argue that the works done on fairness in
BitTorrent are, by our defnition, unfair, 2) We propose that the basic goal
of most works on incentives in P2P is limited because the welfare achieved
by the proposed systems (`Pareto optimality'-`effcient outcomes') is not
`social welfare' and 3) We advocate that using principles from an alternate
economic vision, Participatory Economics, could lead to systems which are
fair and ensure maximization of the social welfare, while being effcient at
the same time." (http://pds.twi.tudelft.nl/reports/2009/PDS-2009-003.pdf)


-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Research:
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
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