Externalities and stability in social cloud

Abstract

Social Clouds have been gaining importance because of their potential for efficient and stable resource sharing without any (monetary) cost implications . There is a need, however, to look at how a social structure or relationship evolves to build a Social Cloud (by identifying factors that affect the social structure) and how social structure impacts individual resource sharing behavior. This paper presents a pairwise resource (or pairwise service) sharing social network model to explore the interdependence between social structure and resource (service) availability for an individual user or player. The paper also investigates effects of social structure on individual resource availability. Further, the paper analyzes positive and negative externalities, and aims to characterize stable social clouds.

Resource Availability in the Social Cloud: An Economics Perspective

“…For the sake of completeness, we first describe the social cloud model presented in Mane et al (2014). A social cloud can be seen as a socially-aware resource sharing network = { , } that consists of a non-empty set of agents and a set of undirected links connecting these agents.…”

“…of services and workload balance. Another research trend (Mane et al, 2020b(Mane et al, , 2019(Mane et al, , 2014(Mane et al, , 2020aMoscibroda et al, 2011) focuses on endogenous social connections in terms of resource sharing network formation, the stability and efficiency analysis of these networks, and analysis of externalities in these resource sharing networks. For example, Mane et al (2020b) study social storage cloud formation in a strategic setting, where self-interested agents build a storage resource sharing network for maximizing their respective utilities.…”

Externalities in endogenous sharing economy networks

“…Similar to Mane, Ahuja, and Krishnamurthy (2014), we define the probability that agent i obtains a resource from j as…”

“…According to Chard et al (2012), agents could limit resource sharing with friends who are close to them. Mane, Ahuja, and Krishnamurthy (2014) capture this closeness by using the harmonic centrality measure (Boldi and Vigna 2014), as…”

“…To study the above aspects, we consider the social cloud model proposed by Mane, Ahuja, and Krishnamurthy (2014), a sharing economy network (Georgiadis, Iosifidis, and Tassiulas 2017), different from platform-mediated sharing models and endogenously formed. On the one hand, we have online data backup services like Buddy-Backup 1 and CrashPlan 2 , which are examples of such social clouds, where two agents share or trade resources directly with each other, without an intermediary third-party.…”