Brief announcement: Composition games for distributed systems: The EU grants games

Abstract

A traditional distributed system was, usually, designed by some centralized manufacturer and owned by some central owner. On the other hand, many modern distributed systems (e.g., many Peer to Peer (P2P) networks) are formed when people team up to pool their resources together to form such a system. We aim to initiate an investigation into the way people make a distributed decision on the composition of such a system, with the goal of realizing high values. Intuitively, we look at settings in which, by teaming up, a node increases its utility, however, it also pays a cost that often (as mentioned later) increases with the size of the system. The right balance is achieved by the right size system. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.