What's a Little Collusion Between Friends?

Edmund L. Wong and Lorenzo Alvisi

Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) 2013.

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areas
Distributed Systems, Game Theory

abstract
This paper proposes a fundamentally different approach to addressing the challenge posed by colluding nodes to the sustainability of cooperative services. Departing from previous work that tries to address the threat by disincentivizing collusion or by modeling colluding nodes as faulty, this paper describes two new notions of equilibrium, k-indistinguishability and k-stability, that allow coalitions to leverage their associations without harming the stability of the service.