Changing Neighbours: Improving Tag-Based Cooperation

In systems of autonomous self-interested agents, in whichagents' neighbourhoods are defined by their connections toothers, cooperation can arise through observation of the behaviour of neighbours to determine values of trust and reputation. While there are many techniques for encouragingcooperative behaviour within such systems, they often require a centralised authority or rely on reciprocity that isnot always available. In response, this paper presents a decentralised mechanism to supporting cooperation withoutrequiring reciprocity. The mechanism is based on tag-basedcooperation, supplemented by assessing neighbourhood context and using simple rewiring to cope with cheaters. Inparticular, the paper makes two key contributions. First, itprovides a technique for increasing resilience in the face ofmalicious behaviour by enabling individuals to rewire theirconnections to others and so modify their neighbourhoods. Second, it provides an empirical analysis of several strategiesfor rewiring, evaluating them through simulations.

Authors

• Nathan Griffiths
• Michael Luck King's College London

Keywords

• Cooperation
• Tags
• Rewiring
• Reputation
• P2P