Emergence of cooperation in peer‐to‐peer systems: A complex adaptive system approach

Abstract

Overall performance of a peer-to-peer system can be highly variable and unpredictable as there is no central authority to set and coordinate the amount of resource contributions made by constituent peers. In this paper, we address the problem of optimal cooperation policy setting for individual peers by taking into account their rationality, and with respect to a set of overall constraints imposed by resource-driven requirements of the system. We formalize distributed cooperation policy setting as an asynchronous distributed decision making (ADDM) process and represent an integrated design for this process in two top-down and bottom-up phases. In top-down design, we specify the overall objective and constraints and in line with them, we synthesize the local objectives of individual peers. We show that the rational peers should continuously adapt their cooperation policies asynchronously and autonomously according to the policies of the other participants in order to maximize their local objectives. To this end, we devise a self-organizing interaction mechanism in the bottom-up phase and demonstrate that it coordinates asynchronous distributed decisions of individual peers with respect to the overall objective and constraints through local interactions.

Emergence in the U.S. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) workforce: an agent-based model of worker attrition and group size in high-density STEM organizations

“…Rouchier et al [12] found that worker similarities in individual values and social influence proximity mitigate the effects of worker attrition on information promulgation, thus having an impact on knowledge transfer. Along these lines, conventional research has showed that increased technical knowledge worker participation on project teams is associated with better overall organizational performance [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. There is limited evidence of research using DSIT for STEM worker density within an organizational environment.…”

“…In recent years, a substantial body of systems and agentbased modeling research on worker attrition and grouporiented culture has focused on linkages to organizational performance and employee satisfaction at large [3][4][5][6][7][8]. These studies have shown that worker homogeneity and smaller work groups generally relate to improved worker performance, satisfaction, and lower attrition rates across all worker-types [6][7][8].…”