Employing economics to achieve fairness in usage policing of cooperatively shared computing resources

A cooperative virtual organization (VO) is formed when distinct organizations pool their computing and data resources together. In a typical VO, there is no central authority that governs the amount of resources that each organization should contribute to the community. To prevent free-riding on shared resources, we introduce policies to curb excessive usage in an equitable manner. While centralized schemes are simple, they are generally inefficient due to the presence of irregular workload traffic. This paper theoretically demonstrates how under specific conditions, an economy-based framework can be designed to achieve fairness. From our formalization, we conceptually show that agent homogeneity and load-based pricing schemes on shared resources can help achieve this requirement.