Social Networking and Game Theory to foster Cooperation

Reputation management systems have been proven in the past to be a valuable tool to foster cooperation in distributed systems, as they rely on the nodes’ active participation to sustain the availability of the resources and scalability. In this paper, we exploit ideas from Game Theory to propose a game theoretical framework to model the interactions of rational and selfish nodes in distributed systems. Our approach differs from previous works in the field as we introduce reputation in the definition of the utility function along with a punishment factor for nodes cooperating with untrustworthy entities.