Incentives for resource sharing in self-organized communities: From economics to social psychology

In this position paper we analyze the benefits of enabling virtual communities to self-organize and introduce a novel research direction for providing incentives, required in this context, for resource sharing and cooperation. We argue that the social aspect, which is missing from today’s peer-to-peer (p2p) systems, should be seen both as a goal and a means for self-organized virtual communities to be built and fostered. Hence, we propose that the ongoing research efforts for designing effective incentive mechanisms in p2p systems, based on principles from game theory, should be directed towards a more sociological/psychological approach. We also provide some possible first steps towards this direction.