A model for the behaviors and incentives of users in a decentralized data-sharing network.

This paper presents a simple model for representing and evaluating the behavior of users participating in a decentralized data-sharing system. The aim is to explore alternatives to current Web 2.0 systems which suffer from trust attacks, bias, administrative overhead and brittleness. In our model, users get to share documents that they like and they follow other users who are more likely to share documents that they will like. Since there is no central authority, the users also use local and independent means of discovering and ranking documents. We show, using a simulation of the model, that this scheme provides an incentive for users to contribute to the system, and it makes the system more resistant to attacks.