Incentives for Voting-Based Quality Control and Document Storage in P2P Collaboration Systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems achieve scalability, fault tolerance, and load balancing, while effectively reducing infrastructure cost compared to client/server systems. For large wiki-based collaboration systems these characteristics can be beneficial as well. However, a fully decentralized P2P-based collaboration system requires appropriate incentives for users to (a) contribute resources for storing and providing documents, and (b) to participate in collaborative control mechanisms for keeping content quality at a high level. Therefore, this position paper proposes a score-based incentive scheme for voting-based quality control and document storage in a P2P-based collaboration system. The approach is based on the PeerVote mechanism, which enables users to vote on content modifications. In order to encourage peers to store and vote on documents, each peer is assigned a score related to its contribution. Peers have an incentive to achieve a high score which allows them to create and approve new documents. The scheme proposed is resistant to fraud, since the score can be verified by any other peers.