Brief Announcement: Composition Games for Distributed Systems: The EU Grants Games

Abstract

A traditional distributed system was, usually, designed by some centralized manufacturer and owned by some central owner. On the other hand, many modern distributed systems (e.g., many Peer to Peer (P2P) networks) are formed when people team up to pool their resources together to form such a system. We aim to initiate an investigation into the way people make a distributed decision on the composition of such a system, with the goal of realizing high values. Intuitively, we look at settings in which, by teaming up, a node increases its utility, however, it also pays a cost that often (as mentioned later) increases with the size of the system. The right balance is achieved by the right size system.

Longer version at http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5255. This paper supported in part by the Net-HD MAGNET consortium, by the Israel Science Foundation, by the Technion Gordon Center, the Bi-national US-Israel Science Foundation, the Israeli ministry of science, the Google Inter-university center for Electronic Markets and Auctions, and at the Technion by a fellowship of the Israel Council for Higher Education.