The Peer’s Dilemma: A General Framework to Examine Cooperation in Pure Peer–to–Peer Systems

The exploration of social dilemmas is being considered a major foundation for encountering the enforced necessities of cooperation in self–organizing environments. Such environments are characterized by self–interested parties and the absence of trusted third parties. Recent approaches apply evolutionary socio–inspired games to formally prove the existence and further prolongation of cooperation patterns within communities. For instance, the Prisoner’s Dilemma game has thus provided a rich opportunity to examine self–interested behaviors in pure peer–to–peer networks. However, assuming a total absence of coalitions, incentives and punishment mechanisms, several works argue against a durable maintenance of cooperation neither at single–shot nor repeated–scenarios. In this article, we formally and experimentally demonstrate a counterexample for the latter by applying evolutionary game theory and a particular instance of the Rock–Scissors–Paper game. Our framework proves that the cyclic dominance of certain type of nodes within a P2P system has an impact and introduces a strategic aspect to the evolution of the overall community.