The Impact of Churn on Uncertainty Decay in P2P Reputation Systems

Reputation systems rely on historical information to account for uncertainty about users´ intention to cooperate, but accumulating experience over long time periods is challenging in many situations. In peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, this operation is particularly hard due to churn-the continuous process of node arrival and departure. Key issues here include how churn impacts newcomers´ perceptions and which key factors result in a slowing of uncertainty decay. New research explores these issues, and experimental results show the impact of churn on uncertainty reduction.