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Science

Cooperation Works if Majority Can Punish Freeloaders 408

Posted by michael from the cooperate-or-die dept.
plasmid writes: "Some Swiss economists ran an investment game... they found that if the majority could punish freeloaders, cooperation flourished. I think this has implications for cooperative peer-to-peer systems and, to a lesser extent, for open source development. I'm so inspired I plan to go out an punish someone right now, as a matter of fact." I had just read this article the other day (go memepool), so this Nature piece seems oddly apropos.
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Cooperation Works if Majority Can Punish Freeloaders More

Cooperation Works if Majority Can Punish Freeloaders

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  • In the most recent Scientific American (I just got it in the mail a couple weeks ago; I don't know if it's on the stands yet), there is a long detailed article about this exactly. The article covers a lot of examples and guesses a lot on the reasons for the behavior.

  • Damn (Score:2, Funny)

    by Jailbrekr ( 73837 )
    I guess we'll start seeing bigger upload/download ratios on Warez servers now... :(

    • Re:Damn (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Restil ( 31903 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @03:51AM (#2815247) Homepage
      I know its funny, but this actually applies.

      Think about it. If you have one large server that everyone tries to download from without others participating, several problems emerge. First of all, you saturate the bandwidth on that connection. Secondly, with limited resources, it takes much longer for everyone to obtain what they're wanting. And when the server is located by authorities and shut down, a major resource is lost.

      Now, have everyone serve. Anyone looking for something can always find it, because its everywhere. They can always get it, because no one server is oversaturated, as the load is spread out. If one or even several servers get shut down, the effect is minimal. Everyone benefits when everyone cooperates and nobody is hit too harshly.

      Now we have another form of potential punishment in this case, not from those that participate, but from law enforcement. Law enforcement, unlike the traders, is more likely to go after those who DO participate, and the freeloaders will get off scott free.

      -Restil

      • Re:Damn (Score:3, Interesting)

        by blank_coil ( 543644 )
        I definately agree with you and have seen examples of this on IRC. A few weeks ago when the FBI busted all those warez servers, traffic died down quite a bit. I read somewhere that they found out the reason for this wasn't necessarily because people were afraid to serve, but because there were only a few people that basically served a lot that everyone else mooched off of, and those were the people that got busted.

        On the other hand, though, I think there are other reason for not contributing. Case in point (switching gears somewhat to Morpheus), I have Morpheus running ALL THE TIME on a DSL connection. But when I want to surf the web or download something, all those downloads kill my bandwidth. For this reason, I've set the maximum number of users that can download off of me at one time to 1, and the maximum bandwidth allowed for that to about 3.5kb/s. Now, I'm not using my computer all the time and I don't have a problem with allowing more users and more bandwidth when I'm not, but it's such a hassle to change the settings every time I want to step away from my computer and every time I come back. So, it stays at 1 user at 3.5kb/s.

        But, if there was a better program that would, say, allow 10 users at a time and my max bandwidth whenever the screensaver came on, and then brought it back down to 1 user for 3.5kb/s (Morpheus allows resuming, so the cancelled downloads could connect again later) when the screensaver went off (i.e. I'm using the computer), then I would have no problem letting people download to their heart's content.

        So I guess what I'm trying to say is, sometimes contributing is beyond the convenient means of some people. Mayhaps a system (in general, not necessarily a warez system) where contributing was easier, or maybe even somewhat, if not mostly, transparent, would see fewer freeloaders and more people contributing.
      • This is part of the problem but the largest part of the problem is the software used today. The software has to be parasitic. I.E. you close the program, it really doesnt close, you have to search it out and physically kill it (I.E. take some effort) also it needs to seek out and find all files of it's type that it likes to share. (mp3's) automatically build the files to share list, make the user take effort to add "dont share" lists.

        Basically, adding these key features to Gnapster (Open nap clients) and Gnutella or other systems will increase the downloads available.

        finally in order to make it right, the server or the client program needs to check to see if access to the files is actually available and or can be contacted by an outside user. (Say lamer6 has his firewall blocking the transfer ports) the client program needs to segfault with an error stating that it will not run until ports XXXX,YYYY are opened.

        I blame half of the mess out in the file sharing world on the software used (OpenNAP servers suck in the fact they dont instantly delete you when you are gone or leave... anoher software problem, maybe even the client app) and the other half on freeloaders. (little timmy starting to use Imesh can rip his CD's of free artists or download from some nice free artists sites before he starts a sharing client)

        Most of the problem can be resolved with the client app being redesigned or changed. the rest of the problem can be cyber-mafia killing connections that are freeloaders.

  • Funny they should say that (Score:5, Funny)

    by gnalre ( 323830 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @03:52AM (#2815250)
    Funny that Swiss Economists should come up with this conclusion.

    Swiss - Sit back and watch the rest of the world fight tyranny and just rake the money in wherever and however it was attained

    Economists - Earn money based on pseudo-science and predictions which are as reliable as those gained by examining chicken entrails.

    Therefore should'nt we just punish Swiss Economists

  • P2P and freeloaders... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dreamquick ( 229454 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @03:56AM (#2815253) Homepage
    I seem to remember a statistic back in the old napster days that the majority of the people were freeloaders e.g. they just downloaded without offering anything themselves.

    Now if we apply this swiss theory to p2p applications you know what will happen?

    1) if the majority of the users are freeloaders then there is little chance that they are going to kick other freeloading users off the service

    2) assuming that only contributors to the community get a vote then they will be faced with a massive task of getting rid of the freeloaders

    3) once you lose all the freeloaders you are left with the people who adopted early and helped the service become massive, but you will have lost the majority of the userbase

    4) once a service gets a bad reputation it sticks, and since these services gain popularity through word of mouth rather than regular channels you lose a lot of the potential users

    5) lastly a particular p2p service may be good but there are a large number of services which are just as good and which wouldn't support this concept of co-operation.

    Just my 2c
    • You don't need to kick users off. You just need to make the contributing users get some side benifits.

      Example: more and more people are having upload quotas imposed on them (say via dorm networking). You could make the P2P software respect this to make it easier for these epople to contribute, but also make it reserve much of the upload quota for people who have contributed in the past. Thus contributing users would have a much easier time downloading things.
    • I think the best answer to the freeloader problem is the you-get-what-you-pay-for model used by the filesharing program DirectConnect [neomodus.com]

      That works by the client connecting to a so called hub, were the hub administrator can set restrictions like share at least 15 gb and have at least 5 upload slots open, that way the freeloaders will only be able to connect to hubs with no restrictions were they can have fun with all the other freeloaders. now all we need is a decent linux client. [sourceforge.net]

    • In a P2P system, what is the use of freeloaders?

      Really - what is their positive contribution to the system?

      As far as i can see, the only positive side of freeloaders is:

      1. They spread the word - thus bringing more users to the system, even some that aren't freeloaders
      2. They might stop being freeloaders (for example: a person that starts with nothing to share but shares what he/she gets)
      3. It feels good to "just share"
      Number 1 just adds speed to how fast new users find the system (those which are not freeloaders also "spread the word").

      For number 2, if a P2P system allows some sort of "punishment" against freeloaders while at the same time leting them know WHY they are being "punished" probably the number of freeloaders that are "converted" would actually increase.

      For number 3, it feels even beter to share when you know that the persons that get stuff from you will share it further.

      As i see it, less freeloaders means more bandwith for everybody else.


    • 'Freeloading' usually implies that those who are not 'freeloading' are losing something to those who are. Your application of this new study to P2P I think loses this distinction.

      Remember that digital copies don't follow the zero-sum rules that dollars follow.

      Yes, 'freeloading' on napster sucked bandwidth, perhaps hurting the server in some measurable way, and perhaps others in the middle somewhere, but otherwise, the server had everything after the download that he/she had before the download.

    • Your points are certainly valid, but the problem with your analysis is that it ignores the incentive for people to change from freeloaders to contributing members of the community. In other words, the mere existance of a "punishment" mechanism gives freeloaders a good enough reason to not freeload. Like the article says, "The fear of being fined keeps potential defectors in line."

      On a clearly off-topic point, I found this quote particularly interesting:

      "The research may hold lessons for policymakers attempting to build social cohesion, he believes. Decisions may be more acceptable if they come from within the community and not from a remote central government. "There could be more community-based policing, and more emphasis on shaming [criminals] and rehabilitation within the community," Gintis says."
      Which seems to be in line with general conservative thought: more localized government and a criminal justice system designed to punish, leaving rehabilitation to the community. (Not that I take any position on whether conservatives are right or wrong.)

      -sk

    • Faulty logic (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tswinzig ( 210999 )
      Let's see... freeloaders use up the service without contributing. And you think it's a bad thing to get rid of them because if you do, then "there goes your userbase." But if you kick these people off you GAIN: more bandwidth, more room for people that contribute to the service. On top of that, a certain portion of potential freeloaders will be more likely to contribute if they find out they are in danger of being kicked off the service, thereby increasing the value of your service even more.

      As long as it is made very easy to contribute to a service, you should not lose any meaningful users.

  • similar to Prisoner's dilemma non-zero sum game (Score:5, Informative)

    by qubezz ( 520511 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @03:56AM (#2815256)

    A similar set of ideals has been previously applied in psychological and darwinian non-zero sum games where there is a reduced personal gain but higher group gain from cooperation. These games challenge participants in finding an optimal outcome for both in cases where there are multiple iterations of choices to cooperate or 'defect' from cooperation - the website details only a new variant of these.

    One model is that of the cold war. If both countries cooperate in an arms reduction treaty, they both win some, but for the individual country, a win can be made if their competitor cooperates and they 'defect' and build more arsenal.

    This game has a matrix of possible points scored by each side depending on their individual choices.

    . . . . . coop . . defect
    coop . . . 3,3 . . 5,0
    defect . . 0,5 . . 1,1

    In the above situation, the two scores delimited by commas indicate the score for each country. If the countries both cooperate, each receives three points. However, if they disagree, one country will win, but the sum score is less. The interesting situation is if both defect - the value placed on these scores may also determine how the game is played through multiple iterations by two players.

    Another variant is the prisoner's dilemma [brembs.net] game. Two criminals are captured, and the DA will cut one of them a deal if they squeal on the other. Of course, if both squeal on each other, both loose big. If both are quiet, they will get a lesser charge. The dilemma is that the best group outcome is that they will both fare better if they are both quiet, but they don't know what the other will do.

    The article listed is similar to this, but different that there is a cost involved in punishing the 'bad' player that doesn't pay into the investment pot. Here the game asks you to punish the uncooperative player with costs now, but the punishment might make them more likely to contribute in future rounds of the game. Interesting.

    • > Here the game asks you to punish the
      > uncooperative player with costs now, but the
      > punishment might make them more likely to
      > contribute in future rounds of the game.
      > Interesting.

      Yes it is. But strangely in the article, it seems to suggest that the "societies" under test were constantly being changed so that people could not learn the trustworthiness or investment habits of others in the group. That seems counter-intuitive because as you say above, the benefits of the system are reaped only after several iterations.

      I also think that the headline poster was wrong about the potential implications of this:

      1) Open Source software development is by definition a producer/consumer system. The point is that freeloading is allowed - in fact, necessary! What would be the point in a load of hackers writing the Linux kernel if loads of people didn't download it? End users don't have to contribute back to the pool; that's why they are so called.

      2) Peer to peer networks, on the other hand, do not necessarily have a means of production in the first place. You might be able to ease bandwidth troubles etc. by punishing those who do more "clienting" than serving, but there's no sense in punishing those who download more than they upload. I'd say it's almost inevitable that that will be the case for most file-sharing systems.

      In the case of online music distribution (for example), what's needed is a way to punish those who take but don't create. The current system (at least, pre-copy-protected-CDs) of "you don't pay, you don't listen" has at least the merits of logic and fairness.

      Still states the obvious tho'. :-)
    • This is not a new idea, nor is it exclusively the domain of economics. In The Selfish Gene, for example, the biologist Richard Dawkins discusses the evolution of cooperation. He gives the example of chimps removing insects from others' backs. This benefits everyone, since a chimp cannot easily remove insects from his own back. Unfortunately a freeloader who takes without giving benefits even more--unless the others have a way of recognizing and shunning him. Perhaps this is why many animals have such good face recognition.

  • Antecedents of this game (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dashslot ( 23909 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @04:11AM (#2815271)
    This "game" sounds like a development of one which I read in The Economist [economist.com] a few years ago.

    In that, the idea was a group of people had 10 beans , of which some were added to the pot and the rest were kept by the participant. At the end, the he pot was shared amongst all, and the goal was to maximise the indivuduals holding (with no concept of punishment).

    This was carried out at a university (where else?) and it found that while students of most disciplines did the same thing, kept five and shared five, (only) students of economics kept 9 and shared 1. The summary of The Economist wondered whether this was cause or effect of studying economics.

    I wonder if people like Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, ESR et al would keep 1 and share 9, and whether Bill Gates and co would behave more like economists.

  • NewScientist has an article as well. (Score:3, Informative)

    by RedCard ( 302122 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @04:12AM (#2815276)

    If the other sources somehow become slashdotted, NewScientist [newscientist.com] also has an article up on this.

    It's up under the title "Anger plays key role in human cooperation" [newscientist.com].

    --R

  • In the case of file sharing, this is an interesting proposition. How (and why) do you punish someone when the resource is not scarce?

    Money, food and other physical resources are scarce by nature, but files and information are infinitely copyable; the exact opposite.

    Limewire tries to do something like this, where you can refuse connections from clients that are not sharing a certain minimum number of files. The "punishment" being that you are locked out of the rich parts of network because you are not sharing your files.

    Wether making a network smaller by punitive measures is beneficial to the whole community is another question. The dynamics of filesharing are different from physical commodity and financial networks.

    There will always be "leeches". When there is nothing to loose by letting them exist and leech, and where the machines they run expand the network simply by being connected to it, its probably better to keep them included and un-punished, rather than decrease the size of the network.
    • The problem is that "files and information" are a scarce resource in these cases. With most file sharing programs you often have to queue for a long time to get a file, or the bandwidth is shared a little thinly and it's slow to download.

      Two solutions I can see - Punish the users for not sharing, but do so in a fair way. For example, require that if people have nothing to share that they agree to devote a small part of their disk space to cache popular files which automatically get placed there by the system.

      I guess this is at least partly a technological problem to find a way that makes it easy to share and hard to "leach".
      • For example, require that if people have nothing to share that they agree to devote a small part of their disk space to cache popular files which automatically get placed there by the system.

        I believe this is the approach adopted by Mojo Nation [mojonation.net]. Resources cost mojo to access, but you gain mojo by providing resources (CPU cycles, storage space, network bandwidth) that others are willing to pay mojo for, whether it is your own content, or caches. It scales nicely for provider bandwidth, and allocates storage in a distributed fashion, you say how much space you want to give it, but not what you want to store there. But it's not strictly anonymous, and they respect intellectual property rights.

  • Reminds me of an experiment (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jeti ( 105266 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @04:27AM (#2815305)
    People will pay to punish - suggesting that their
    notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations.


    This quote reminds me of an experiment. It runs something like this: A group of people is divided into two groups of equal size. Then each group is asked this simple question: We will either give both groups $2 per person or we'll give each of you three bucks and each of them four bucks. What would you prefer?

    85% of the participants go for the two bucks.
    • Hmm... I could risk a flamebait moderation and note that this might explain classic Liberals...

      But more important than a chance to poke at Lefties is the extreme implications of this: Is perceived fairness really a more important survival trait than unfair 'growth' scenarios? Clearly not, if everyone gains, even unequally, the group as a whole does better and the individuals do better as well. A win/win. Yet the study mentioned by the original poster flies in the face of this simple logic.

      This means that humans may well be hard-wired with a non-survival instinct! But that cannot be the case because we have been selected for millions of years as the best possible survivors on the planet. So what gives? Is there a survival trait hidden in this kind of behavior (something not obvious to me)? If so, is it a trait that applies to small groups of humans living as hunter-gatherers or would it also be a survival trait in larger groups like tribes/cities/nations?

      I think it is just an outgrowth of simple selfishness. I am reminded of a long-ago friend's ovservation that, when someone comments on how good the chocolate bar you have looks, what they really want is for you to give them a piece. And the would take the whole thing if you offered. But if you did give it to them their gratitude would never last longer than it takes to eat it.

      So, perhaps, the real survivor would vote to take the $3 and then take the $4 folk's money too. Oh... Never mind... Now I am picking on Righties. Or is it Lefties? I always get those extreme positions mixed up!

      Jack William Bell -- I may vote Libertarian, but I still think they are a bunch of loser idiots.
      • This means that humans may well be hard-wired with a non-survival instinct! But that cannot be the case because we have been selected for millions of years as the best possible survivors on the planet. So what gives?

        Maybe taking the $2 over the $3 is a form of protection. Perhaps they do not want to give the other group the upper hand, in fear that they could somehow use it against them later.

        Example: A small human tribe is constantly raided by a group of neanderthals. The humans have only sticks and rocks to defend themselves, which are more or less sufficient, except that occasionaly, one or two of them falls in combat with the neanderthals. Some aliens come down and propose this: They will give half of the tribe guns (with ammo) and the other half spears, so that they can better defend themselves.

        The humans quickly agree, for any means to fight off the neanderthals is surely a blessing. The next time the neanderthals attack, the humans massacre them. Not only that, but they go in search of the neanderthal's homes, and kill off their entire tribe. Now the humans have no more enemies. They can start to farm the land, and form an organized society. Leaders must be elected, and rules must be made, so that there is harmony. Half the tribe has guns, the other half has spears. Guess who gets to make the rules.
      • Imagine a group of starving apes.

        Divide them in two groups.

        You either give two portions of food to each member of each group or you give three portions of food to each member of one group and four to each member of the other group.

        In the first case you end up with a bunch of slightly hungry apes.

        In the second case you end up with a group of not-hungry apes and a group of well fed apes. Naturally the well fed ones will beat the crap out of the other ones next time food is distributed and keep all of it, plus they will be higher in the hierarchy, plus they will get all the female-apes while the other ones just get the crap beaten out of them if they even try to approach the females ....

        What can an ape choose???
      • > But more important than a chance to poke at Lefties
        > is the extreme implications of this: Is perceived
        > fairness really a more important survival trait
        > than unfair 'growth' scenarios? Clearly not, if
        > everyone gains, even unequally, the group as a
        > whole does better and the individuals do better as
        > well. A win/win.

        In my experience it is often the *disparity* in wealth rather than the actual magnitude of wealth that matters. If your evaluation function is "number of dollars posessed", then you are correct, but I think that is a little bit too glib.

        Would you start a game of monopoly in the $2000 or $3000/$4000 scenario?
      • There's a long article (which unfortunately is not available online) discussing experiments like these and coming to the conclusion that the vast majority of people value "fairness" over material success in this particular case. I was particularly fascinated by the experiment known as the Ultimatium Game; the article says that only 4% of people, IIRC, choose what the mathematically most beneficial solution. (In other words, in 96% of cases people would choose the "fair" outcome over one that was objectively better for BOTH participants.) Worth checking out if you are interested in this kind of thing.
  • How do we punish the freeloaders of open source?
    Do we even want to? I don't contribute much, but any programming I do on my own time is automatically gpl'ed. I don't even think to make it proprietary... just because I might want to sell it someday. I won't hoarde it. Its an attitude I've developed due to the good nature of others. SOMEDAY I might contribute something more substantial than the code snippets I do now, but without the right mentality, that day may never come to be.

    This is also a slightly different analogy. In a shared investment game, freeloaders reduce the total profit for everyone. However, if I write a program and gpl it, if there's 1 user or 1 million users using it without returning anything, it makes no difference to me. I should have such a problem.

    -Restil

  • The functional principal of a working Anarchy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ArcSecond ( 534786 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @04:41AM (#2815328)
    The research may hold lessons for policymakers attempting to build social cohesion, he believes. Decisions may be more acceptable if they come from within the community and not from a remote central government. "There could be more community-based policing, and more emphasis on shaming [criminals] and rehabilitation within the community," Gintis says.

    This is an example of what most elites have nightmares about... the "masses" deciding for themselves what to do, through concensus and free exchange of information. This is the horrible, to-be-avoided-at-all-costs thing that many refer to as "too much democracy". The key is this: it only works if those with an interest/stake both get a place at the table and the ability to punish people who waste their time with lies and greed.

    I'm convinced this kind of democratic, community-oriented "anarchy" could work at any scale. As long as everyone feels they are part of something meaningful, and that everyone else is taking it seriously, then you can actually get "competitors" to agree on strategies to maximize the Common Good.

    A major stumbling block has been the desire to "punish" criminals by sending them into isolation (or rather, creating isolated COMMUNITIES of criminals), instead of focusing on a more "healing" punishment which would require the community to confront, shame, and supervise the trangressors's rehabilitation.

    For example, look at the pyros in Australia. Doesn't it just sound right that they should walk through the destruction, meet their victims, and generally confronted the effects of their crimes? Is it really better to lock them away where they can learn how to hate society even more? How can they be accepted into society again if they aren't genuinely seeking to make reparations?

    Just like laughter--a social sanction against rigid codes of behaviour--punishment should bring people together. As weird as that sounds, everyone has to share in the duties of rewarding and punishing members of society: the only way to find a common good is to have everyone agree on it. Don't let anyone tell you that you should leave it to the "smarter/better" people to make this decision for everone else. What is best for those with privilege and power is not necessarily best for all.

    • Don't let anyone tell you that you should leave it to the "smarter/better" people to make this decision for everone else. What is best for those with privilege and power is not necessarily best for all.

      This is fine for the 'say sorry to the lady who you knocked over with your skateboard little jimmy - you wont do it again now will you!'

      Much better than calling the police and sending to a juvenile offender centre.

      But when you get into the realms of 'should the UK enter the Euro zone - 99.9% of us don't have enough of an understanding of economics to even START thinking about it.

      You can't vote on everything - most of us don't know enough to decide on most of the really important stuff.
    • I'm convinced this kind of democratic, community-oriented "anarchy" could work at any scale. As long as everyone feels they are part of something meaningful, and that everyone else is taking it seriously, then you can actually get "competitors" to agree on strategies to maximize the Common Good.

      That's a major problem with both anarchy and communism: They are fragile systems and it only takes a small percentage of the population to mess them up. They work great as long as everyone goes along with it (and no-one is stupid or greedy), but break down quickly if everyone doesn't agree to cooperate.

      American democracy, on the other hand, can *never* be as fair or fully representative as these other systems in theory, but in practice it works relatively well. Partly because of the ability of the populace to vote out politicians they don't approve of, and even to revolt should things every get really out of hand, our government mostly acts for the common good.

      • "and even to revolt should things every get really out of hand"

        AHAHAH. That was a laugh. Even with the "holy" 2nd amendment, there is no freakin' chance in hell we anyone is ever going to be able to overthrow the US government with measly firearms. What a joke. Do you really think the political system is going to back down and say "Hey, you know what? This is sort of like what our founding fathers did. Hey everbody, let's just let these revolutionaries overrun us and entirely change the political landscape that has so benefitted us due to our entrenchment".

        And now with the coming soft-weapons to deter legitimate protest, one of the only viable avenues for change, is, sadly, voilent revolt. Welcome to Che's America.

  • Flawed research: getting what you look for ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ukryule ( 186826 ) <slashdot&yule,org> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @04:52AM (#2815354) Homepage
    It seems to me they set up a system *designed* to encourage punishment, then make grand claims about human nature as a result. Each player in the game they designed has an incentive to maximise the amount invested by everyone else - and the only way to influence other people is through punishment.
    People will pay to punish - suggesting that their notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations.
    No. Punishment is a purely selfish strategy: spend money punishing someone, so they will invest more, so your profits increase. All this shows is that the people playing the game were able to come up with vaguely intelligent long term (selfish) strategies.

    If they wanted to prove that people will 'pay to punish', they should have setup the system where the cost of punishing someone was so high that overall profits decreased - and seen how long people kept on punishing.
    • Very good point. In all cases the individual maximizes the function "individual gain" playing with all the variables it can access. If punishment is one of those and it plays a role it'll get used as well.
    • Your definition of "selfish" gets a little abstract. Am I selfish if I lead a life of austerity and sacrifice, so that in the end I will be remembered fondly by the community? By your definition, giving up something in pursuit of a better lot from an improved common good is selfish. I think you are stretching a point.

      Taoists would say that a wise man who REALLY groks his own self-interest does not seek to raise himself above the others, since by so doing he invites attack.

      Imagine two people acting like this, one a Machiavellian, the other a Taoist. Both end up contributing to and sharing in the common good in an objectively equivalent way: their behaviour is indistinguishable. Although their motivations and perspectives may be different, they are each wise enough to know that their best chance at "happiness" lies in serving the community.

      I don't see how you can really call this selfishness. It is a balancing act between investment/sacrifice and profit/reward. Selfishness and wisdom are at odds, here.

      • My definition of a selfish action would be one where the motivation is based purely on the implications for that person (i.e. you don't care what implications it has for anyone else). A selfish action can benefit others, in the same way as a selfless action can benefit the person who does it.
        Imagine two people acting like this, one a Machiavellian, the other a Taoist. Both end up contributing to and sharing in the common good in an objectively equivalent way: their behaviour is indistinguishable. Although their motivations and perspectives may be different, they are each wise enough to know that their best chance at "happiness" lies in serving the community.

        And this is the problem with this study. The game where punishment is allowed is set up so that selfish behaviour is indistinguishable from selfless behaviour. It tells us nothing about the motivation of the players - yet they make claims about the motivation of people.
    • It seems to me they set up a system *designed* to encourage punishment,

      Really they made a system where a punishment is possible

      Each player in the game they designed has an incentive to maximise the amount invested by everyone else

      ...and so they end up maximizing amount invested by everyone

      If they wanted to prove that people will 'pay to punish', they should have setup the system where the cost of punishing someone was so high that overall profits decreased - and seen how long people kept on punishing.

      That's not new - we have such a system right now. In theory I can punish Micro$oft for their bad products which constantly crashing ets. by winning in a court but in practice I need too much resources (read: money) to do this. What they did is lowered the price of punishing and received good (read: gainful for their model society) results.

    • a bit more subtle than that... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by renard ( 94190 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @07:48AM (#2815708)
      I believe the actual research described is somewhat more subtle than your characterization.

      Punishment is a purely selfish strategy: spend money punishing someone, so they will invest more, so your profits increase.

      Incorrect - In the actual experiment, if you chose to punish a `freeloader' then you paid out of your own profits, and no one else's. The games were not iterated (played repeatedly with the same cast of players), so any consequent change in the freeloader's behavior would not be to your benefit. Perhaps on the next time around, the freeloader would have a change of heart, but even if s/he did this was not likely to be to your own benefit.

      Thus in the context of the game, choosing to punish was a very counter-selfish act - not selfish at all, but quite the opposite. That's what makes the research so interesting.

      -Renard

    • They also ignore the fact that a signifigant fraction will punish just because they can, even if it costs them - DDoS attacks and goatse.cx trolls are an excellent example of this.
      Now, if it cost MORE to punish than the punished lost, that might be a bit more interesting.
  • "People say, 'I like to punish'," says Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich.
    So, when applying this to open source development, or P2P software, how does one define the "freeloader" and, what "punishment" does one apply? This obvious risk is that, because people "like to punish", they contributors will be punished as much as, or more than the freeloaders.

    This happens on the online forums, /. included.

    The people who make an effort to make valid contributions, and are "punished", either by being flamed, or by spiteful moderation.

    Very little is gained by knowing that punishment works as form of behaviour modification, the real gain would be knowing how to keep the vigilantes in check.

    • Well as to applying to P2P, I know that one of the clients I used allowed you to give priority to people who _were_ sharing files.
      Open source software is harder. It's really easy to get bitter when you see thousands downloading your product, and not even seeing one 'thanks, it was really handy'. This also applies to an awful lot of free services (the ones that spring to mind are running a website or a mud).
      Protecting against enthusiastic vigilantes is always a problem in a 'peer punishment' system. And saying that, the /. moderation system is about the best I have seen at coping with such a thing. Each moderator can make a difference, but if you moderate badly a further consensus will alter your decision, and if you consistently make bad decisions, your Karma drops low and so you get less potential to make them.
      I could conceive of something similar in the legal system, a 'citizen police card' or somesuch. Good decisions 'improve' your score, bad decisions decrease it, and when it dropped below a certain point, then you lost it.
      • Indeed. But isn't the P2P feature you discuss more of a reward for active participation, than a punishment? Of course, it is arguable that the absence of a reward is in effect a punishment. I suppose it depends on the ratio people receiving rewards to those that do not...
  • Communism works in theory, in theory marge, in theory.

  • Punishing all you slashdot lurkers (Score:5, Funny)

    by ukryule ( 186826 ) <slashdot&yule,org> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @04:58AM (#2815363) Homepage
    So next time I get moderation priveledges, I'm going to mod down people who haven't posted anything :)

  • censorware.org as a case study - SERIOUS (Score:4, Troll)

    by Seth Finkelstein ( 90154 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @05:13AM (#2815391) Homepage Journal
    [Let's see how long this article lasts with a positive score ...]

    I've been wrestling with the article's issue, on a game-theoretic level, for years. For example, many people simply do not understand what I say when I discuss the events and aftermath of
    What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]

    It's far deeper than ego or "personal", which are superficial reactions I get. In game-theory, the Prisoner's Dilemma [constitution.org] teaches us that that individuals have an incentive to defect in terms of cooperative resources. Now, having said that, what then? What follows? How does one go about organizing a cooperative venture with this knowledge in mind?

    To quote the article:

    When penalties were allowed, the common good prevailed, and the investment by each group member climbed. "But if there's no opportunity for punishment, cooperation unravels," says Fehr, with investment declining rapidly.

    This is the exact argument I made passionately regarding the necessity of making there be some penalty for Michael Sims' actions in destroying censorware.org. It's the flip side of enlightened self-interest. Cooperation cannot be supported if someone can defect without penalty. But:

    In some games, players could then fine each other, but they had to pay a small sum for this.
    Indeed. It's not costless to create downsides. This makes it tempting to ignore their role in maintaining cooperation. They're unpleasant, to say the least.

    But what if it's nigh-impossible to have a penalty? This is an aspect where I think about "the power of journalism". As a programmer who has worked with journalists (many times unhappily), I'm acutely aware that as a general rule, journalists can harm me with manipulated coverage, much more than I can punish them via semi-futile protests about their actions. This is in fact my number-one publicity worry about anti-censorware work and how I'd ever get covered nowadays in Slashdot if I ever were to be sued like Dmitry Sklyarov.

    So in the end, I don't have a solution. But the implications of this problem are NOT abstract, in fact are very immediate.

    • Indeed. It's not costless to create downsides. This makes it tempting to ignore their role in maintaining cooperation. They're unpleasant, to say the least.

      Well, if they have the power to punish someone then aren't they, by default, cooperating? Therefore, maintaining cooperation is the simple task of punishing those who are not cooperating. They cannot ignore their role in punishing defectors, because the defectors are preventing them from cooperating. That is, their desire for cooperation outweighs the cost necessary to punish those who are sabatoging the harmony, therefore they will always punish the defectors. No?
      • Let me try to clarify what I meant in that paragraph. In most simple discussions of Prisoner's Dilemma competitions, much is made that the strategy of Tit-For-Tat [spectacle.org] is a winner. This cooperates in response to previous cooperation, and defects in response to previous defection. When people then try to draw moral prescriptions from this strategy, they almost always focus on the respond with cooperation part, and ignore the respond with defection part of the strategy. But both responses, even the negative response, are a vital part of ensuring overall cooperation - and that's the lesson of the article about punishing freeloaders here.

        And this problem manifested itself in the case study of censorware.org. Many people offered well-meaning advice to simply let Michael Sims defect on us all without any corresponding action (that is, completely ignore all the damage and broken links and misdirection caused by his destroying censorware.org). I understand the nice-person reasoning behind this advice. But I always thought it was deeply flawed in a game-theoretic sense.

        Now remember, a negative response costs both parties. And we're dealing with human beings, not program strategies. It's very tempting to avoid the moral hit associated with initiating a negative response. I've gotten many a comment that I lessen myself, I lower my reputation, by discussing
        What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]

        I'm not blind to that. But in game-theory terms, I'm paying the cost myself of responding to a defection. It's important to do it, even at a cost.

        Where things get even worse, though, is "the power of journalism" problem. Which is basically, what if someone can't respond?. What do you do if you're a programmer, and a journalist defects on you? Sometimes a workable response is to get some other journalist to champion your cause, but that's not something to rely upon. And even if so, that tends not to hurt the defecting journalist anywhere near as much as the defecting journalist can hurt the programmer. This is why I keep wrestling with the problem.

  • ...is combated pretty well just by the program's default configuration to share the download directory. the majority of morpheus/kazaa/gnutella/etc users either don't know that they're sharing files or don't care.

    i see this a lot at school when people wonder why their connection was rate limited. almost always, if the person doesn't know why their computer did a lot of traffic, it's because they installed a p2p filesharing program, downloading some stuff, and left it running with all their downloads shared. given the current state of the p2p filesharing userbase, i don't think any drastic measures really need to be taken to ensure availability of files.

    that said, i was surprised to note that limewire allows you to control who can download from your machine according to the number of files they have shared. so even if it's not required to keep the system running well, at least one of the more popular programs already has a system in place to reward those who contribute.

  • Basic economics theory - the lighthouse (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @05:36AM (#2815453) Homepage
    This is basic economics, as taught to me in my economics 'A'-Level at college in 1990. The example always given is that of a lighthouse.

    A lighthouse is for the common good, but can't exist without being charged for. However, due to its nature (it just emits light), you cannot deny service to those who don't pay - they'll see light regardless of whether they've contributed.

    The dilemma is - as a ship owner, you have no incentive to pay for upkeep as the service is delivered to you anyway. This works right up until the moment the lighthouse has to close, at which point it becomes in your best interest to ensure everyone pays. Note that - everyone, not just you. If only you pay, you're still at a disadvantage.

    Can't remember the exact terminology they used - I think it's a form of 'free good', but I'm prepared to be corrected on that. Why these researchers felt the need to reprove a very old and established theory is beyond me.

    Cheers,
    Ian

    PS: 'A'-Levels - the exams in the UK taken when you're about 18.

    • "Public good" is the phrase you're looking for.

      The same applies to national defence, roads, hospitals, fire stations, and everything else which most individuals can't afford on their own, but which benefit everyone (or many people) indiscriminately of who pays.

      Hence... taxation. :)
  • There is a lot in this book:
    Axelrod, Robert: The Evolution of Cooperation
    which is relevant to this discussion and also to how open source development works, particularly if you read it alongside Eric Raymond's stuff.
  • I see a lot of people are applying this idea to a single open source app, and saying that the developers are the "good guys", and the users are "freeloaders". No surprise there -- this is slashdot. :)

    And while I don't agree that this "freeloading" is a bad thing*, I think that the case of a single app is not what the article author was getting at.

    Where this model is relevant is for open-source development. When you release free code (free as in beer), it becomes part of the resource pool available to all developers. However, cooperation in this way does not flourish, unless we find a way to punish freeloaders, i.e. those who use free code but do not contribute.

    And we've found one. Its called the GPL, and should (if it ever gets upheld in court) force those who want to use free (as in speech) code to contribute.

    indecision


    * even the most non-active user still contributes by adding to download stats if nothing else and therefore providing an indicator of how popular an app is

  • It is interesting considering the article in terms of the SPAM problem. I found the following quote particularly interesting:

    The research may hold lessons for policymakers attempting to build social cohesion, he believes. Decisions may be more acceptable if they come from within the community and not from a remote central government.

    I have to agree with their conclusion here. I'm less than thrilled with the prospect of moronic politicians attempting to solve the problem. Their track record of internet related laws is absolutely horrifying. Local laws isn't going to solve the spam problem, and asking for anti-spam laws just encourages them to pass other bad internet laws.

    The other option is action within the community. Networks dropping data or entire connections with anyone who carries SPAM. Black hole lists. Etc. Punnish anyone who carries spam.

    This causes some temporary inconvienences and data loss. Some people even try to call it censorship and worry about abuse. I say it's a non-issue, not censorship, and any abuse is self limiting. You can always send your data over another network. If someone tries to abuse a blackhole list, people wont subscribe to it.

  • On democracy and the Nash equilibrium (Score:3, Interesting)

    by puppetluva ( 46903 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @06:38AM (#2815569)
    Interesting that this post should come up at the same time that "Beautiful Mind" is in the theaters

    The finding of the Swiss Economists is close to the very premise of pure democracy and why forms of it have by-and-large overcome monarchic states. Combined with the assumption that game theory and John Nash's work is based on(see Beautiful Mind -- or better, read his research) "that equilibrium can be predicted when you take into account that each player acts in his/her own self interest", you have good theoretical evidence supporting the findings of this research.[Actually both Game-theory and Nash tend to start with the presumption that people will act in their own self-interest first and foremost]

    In order for the majority to have the power to punish freeloaders, they must first have power to begin with. With majority vote and regular turnover, the opportunity to enact this is provided for. If everyone acts in their own self interest and they have the power to vote, then freeloaders MUST be punished.

    If the majority are freeloaders, then those that contribute least will be punished. (Napster is shut down, but everyone who knows how to contribute still has access by some means). If this "freeloader" society is self-sufficient, it will eventually turn itself around if it is interested in self-survival. In the case of government, democracies turn themselves around because the cost of non-cooperation is death. Napster and p2p are bad examples becase the cost of community-death is not as dire as individual-death.

    The summary of this rant: community works if either 1) the act of cooperation is equivalent to the act of acting in the majority's self-interest and/or 2) acting in the majority's self-interest does not lead to the destruction of the community. True democracy allows for consistent societal change in both of these directions.

  • Great subject (Score:2, Informative)

    by -ryan ( 115102 )
    I'm not an academic but I've become really interested in Complex Adaptive Systems research recently (I was interested in this before I knew what it was but that's another story). One of the books I came accross was "The Complexity of Cooperation" [amazon.com] by Robert Axelrod. In it he discusses much of the research that led them to Tit-for-Tat and many other strategies for the Iterated Prisoners Delima. Very good read, check it out.
  • A classic (if now considered somewhat unethical) experiment in the 60s by Milgram [new-life.net] shows the dangers with telling people to administer punishment to others... especially where they're told that they should do so (in short, when told to administer punishment to a level that could cause serious permanent physical damage to a stranger, two-thirds of people will tend to do so if sufficiently emotionally detached).

    A lynch mob is never too far away, try Canetti's Crowds and Power [amazon.com] too...

    T

  • Five words: G, P, L (Score:3, Informative)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @08:15AM (#2815787) Homepage Journal
    (including the words "Five words")

    I didn't see anybody at +3 making the analogy to the GPL vs. the BSD-like licenses.

    In a sense, the GPL "punishes" freeloaders by denying them resources - "If you don't share with us, then we won't let you have a share of the pot." If you won't contribute to the shared codebase, you cannot take from the shared codebase.

    Compare and contrast that to the BSD-like licenses that don't have the "Release the source" requirement - a freeloader (certainly Microsoft, possibly Transgaming, possibly Lindows) can take from the public pool, not give back, and incur no "punishment".

    I used to think that RMS was a crazy, extremist bastard. Then something happened to cause me to revisit that thinking. I work professionally with a product called RtX, which is an X Windowing System server for the embedded operating system VxWorks. RtX is derived from XFree86. I've had several problems with RtX - it won't recognize certain graphics chips, it doesn't support font server use, it won't do anything but 256 pseudocolor, I cannot easily add key bindings or LEDs to the keyboard routines, and (most importantly) it won't work under the newer versions of VxWorks. None of these would be insurmountable problems if I had the source, but the folks that did the conversion of XFree into RtX (and it isn't a trivial conversion, not just ./configure --with-vxworks; make ) were not compelled to release their changes by the XFree license. Result - a less than stellar server, that locks me into a buggy and feature-lacking OS (Don't say it - as soon as I have the manpower my project will be converted to Linux.)

    I know I just enraged the "GPL is tyranny, BSD is freedom" crowd. But please, think about this for a moment. If you wish to continue to use the BSD license for your code, wonderful. However, any code I do off-hours will be released under the GPL, for the reasons stated above.
  • Given: Freeloading is defined as the lack of cooperation.
    Given: Punishment is defined as the act of making a given behavior fail to work.
    Given: Something is considered to work if the majority does not fail when executing that behavior.

    Conclude: The subject of this story is tautological; the subject "Cooperation" grammatically must "work" when its opposite "freeloading" is defined to not work by means of majority punishment.

    Caveat: The results of this research most likely aren't useless or obvious; tautologies are, after all, incontrovertable truths, and lets not forget what science seeks.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

  • Can't remember where (Score:2, Interesting)

    by caffeined ( 150240 )
    but I read an interesting article on a related subject the other day. (I thought it was in Scientific American, but couldn't find it on their site.)

    The gist of the study was that people have a natural tendency (apparently) to look for fairness in interactions. They took pairs of people and gave one of them $10. This person was asked to offer as much of the money to the other person as they wanted. The second person could choose to accept or reject the offer. If accepted, both people would keep the money they had but if rejected neither could keep anything. Obviously, whatever the second person received would be free money, so logically (one would think) it's in their interest to accept whatever is offered, even if it's just a penny. But what the researchers found is that this is not what happens - instead, the second person would reject offers deemed insufficient. They ran this experiment in a number of places so that they could control for cultural differences, etc. There were cultural differences (in some places the offerer would actually offer more than half the money to the second person) but they consistently found that there was a limit below which people would reject the offer - apparently viewing it as unfair.

    If I remember where I found it I'll add a link, if possible, in a later post.
  • The really funny thing to me is that this is "news" to some people. Seems like common sense to me. It's a shame that there are actually people on /. who look at a study like this and feel that it's a revelation. Ah, the bitter fruits of socialism.

    Next, /. will let us know about some scientific research that indicates that those students who study tend to make better grades... outrageous!
  • Direct Connect [neo-modus.com] for Windows does something along these lines. I've only used it once, but I know that many of the servers you can log into require you to be sharing a minimum amount of data (say, 4 gigs) before you can join. As a result there is a hell of a lot of files available on the network. At least, there was when I signed on that one time several months ago.
  • If only this sort of majority control could be applied to Military financial resources [osearth.com] we might could actually achieve preventitive warfare (like in preventitive healthcare.)

    Certainly it is a minority (in comparision to the 6 billion plus of world population) who control such resources in a non productive manner.

  • This doesn't apply to software, because... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @10:17AM (#2816388) Homepage Journal

    Just as I'll claim if you try to use traditional economic arguments to justify "ownership" of software, or whatever, analogies between physical property (money) and property that can be duplicated (software, information) just don't hold up. The fact that you can share software or information with a friend without losing it yourself makes a HUGE difference in any kind of economic game. (There is some cost, for instance bandwidth in a peer-to-peer system, but I think it is mostly negligible.)

    However, I would expect that this result does in fact hold for IP-less software economies as well. I am just saying that making direct comparisons is always trouble.
  • Long ago before the world wide web was born and the internet was just an infant, we called this mob rule. This brings up the old movies where a mob wants to go and lynch somebody they _THINK_ has done something wrong. They want to do this without knowing all the information, and without just process. I am not sure I like this idea at all. This same type of co-operation is why so many people believed the world was flat. This could used as a tool to discredit valid options and opinions.

  • Social discovery in peer networks and cooperation (Score:3, Informative)

    by PureFiction ( 10256 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @11:54AM (#2817074)
    There is another method for ensuring cooperation and fair behavior in peer networks. And it works the same was as the method described.

    It is called social discovery, and it works by having each and every peer create a view of the network that suits their interests and needs. In such an environment, the freeloading peers will not be viewed as valuable peers and will be dropped from your peer group(s); no longer used, and no longer using your resources.

    On the flip side, there is a strong incentive to become a better, more reliable peer yourself, as the quality of peers you can associate with is directly related to how they perceive *your* quality to them.

    If you want to be able to tap better, higher quality peers, then you should keep your node available longer, more often, and also share more resources (whatever they may be).

    The project I am working on that implements this social discovery mechanism is called the ALPINE Network [cubicmetercrystal.com] and there is also another social discovery based project called NeuroGrid [neurogrid.net].

    I am biased towards this kind of approach, but I think it provides the best long term solution to resource discovery / searching in large peer networks.

  • Dead tree reference (Score:3, Informative)

    by isomeme ( 177414 ) <cdberry@gmail.com> on Thursday January 10, 2002 @12:56PM (#2817594) Journal
    It's not available online, but the January 2002 issue of Scientific American has a very relevant article titled "The Economics of Fair Play". It discusses the nonrational dynamics of how groups of human expect and enforce fairness. Definitely worth a read for open-source economic theorists and fans of intriguing behavioral-psych experiments.

  • My idea for a fair peer-to-peer system. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gendou ( 234091 ) on Thursday January 10, 2002 @08:34PM (#2820956) Homepage
    I'll use a Napster-like system as an example, but when I refer to "songs", you can easily substitute "movies," or "naked pictures of Natalie Portman," or just "files."

    1. It costs one Point to download a song from another user.

    2. Users have unlimited Points for a certain trial period (some people will try to re-register every day to get around this, but that problem may or may not significant enough to affect the service).

    3. Users get a certain (small) number of Points each day.

    4. Each time a song is downloaded from a user, that user gets two Points. This will be the primary means of gaining Points.

    5. Note that the person the song was downloaded from received two Points for the transfer, but the person who downloaded it only paid one Point. This means that the total number of Points in the universe will increase by one for each song that's transferred. This if fine -- it keeps the system from being too strict. You can take up to twice what you give, which should be generous enough for most people's tastes.

    6. People who have a lot of songs to share will have many more Points than they could possibly spend. This is fine. If you're even moderately generous, you shouldn't have to worry too much about what you take.

    7. Most people who generously offer the songs they have will wind up with more than enough Points. Those who DON'T offer what they have will find themselves frequently running short, and will be encouraged to start offering what they have.

    8. To further motivate people to accumulate a lot of unused Points, have a "Hall of Fame" listing top Point-holders, top new Point-holders, fastest-rising Point-holders, etc. People love stats; witness the people who'll install the D.net or SETI client on 5000 computers primarily to increase their rank in the stats.

    9. For further motivation, offer additional prizes for accumulating Points. Maybe a person who reaches 100,000 Points gets a T-shirt, or a person can exchange 10,000 Points for a coffee mug.

    10. Who pays for the T-shirts, and the service? Users with low bandwidth who otherwise would have a hard time earning Points can earn them by an alternative method of contributing to the service: financially. Whether you make songs available to users of the service, or help the service meet its financial needs, you have to contribute to the servicein SOME way to get a significant share of songs from the service.

    11. Another way to encourage people to earn large numbers of Points would be to give preferential download treatment to higher-ranked users. For example, if the person hosting a song has configured his client to only allow other users to only download 200kbit/sec from his machine, and five users try to download from him at once, the 100,000-Point user might get to download 100kbit/sec from him, the three 10,000-Point users might get 33kbit/sec each, and the 2-Point user might be forced to download from a slower host.

    12. This'll not only encourage users to offer more of their songs more generously so that they can download from faster hosts than those who don't, it'll also ensure that people with slow connections will get some people downloading from them (and thus the people with the slow connections will get to earn some points too), rather than every single user swamping the fastest hosts, bogging them down until they're slower than the slowest hosts.

    Ideas? Suggestions? Flaws? Discuss.

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