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<article-title>An Incentive Mechanism for Message Relaying in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Systems</article-title>
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<author><name>Cuihong Li</name></author>
<aff>School of Business, University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269, USA</aff>

<author><name>Bin Yu</name></author>
<aff>Quantum Leap Innovations 3 Innovation Way, Suite 100 Newark, DE 19711, USA</aff>

<author><name>Katia Sycara</name></author>
<aff>School of Computer Science<br/> Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA</aff>
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<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>Distributed message relaying is an important function of a peer-topeer
system to discover service providers. Existing search protocols
in unstructured peer-to-peer systems either create huge burden
on communications or cause long response time. Moreover, these
systems are also vulnerable to the free riding problem. In this paper
we present an incentive mechanism that not only mitigates the
free riding problem, but also achieves good system efficiency in
message relaying for peer discovery. In this mechanism promised
rewards are passed along the message propagation process. A peer
is rewarded if a service provider is found via a relaying path that includes
this peer. We provide some analytic insights to the symmetric
Nash equilibrium strategies of this game, and an approximate
approach to calculate this equilibrium. Experiments show that this
incentive mechanism brings a system utility generally higher than
breadth-first search and random walks, based on both the estimated
utility from our approximate equilibrium and the utility generated
from learning in the incentive mechanism.</p>
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