User Motivation and Persuasion Strategy for Peer-to-Peer Com

In recent years, peer-to-peer systems have become more and more popular, especially with some successful applications like Napter, Kazaa and edoney. However, how to motivate user participation in peer-to-peer systems remains an open question for researcher

User Motivation and Persuasion Strategy

for Peer-to-peer Communities

Ran Cheng

MSc. Student

Supervisor: Dr. Julita Vassileva Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan

rac740@http://www.77cn.com.cnask.ca

ABSTRACT

In recent years, peer-to-peer systems have become more and more popular, especially with some successful applications like Napter, Kazaa and edoney. However, how to motivate user participation in peer-to-peer systems remains an open question for researchers. If few users are willing to participate in the community or make contributions to it, the peer-to-peer system will never become a successful one. To address the problem, this paper proposes a motivation strategy based on the theories of social psychology. The main idea is to introduce a set of hierarchical memberships into p2p communities and reward active users with better quality of services. We have applied this strategy to a p2p system called Comtella and launched a study to test its effectiveness. The preliminary results of the study have show that the motivation strategy is capable of stimulating the users to participate more actively and make more contributions to community.

the system, searched for what they need and then logged out. In this way there were very few people simultaneously on-line. Consequently the possibility of users finding the files they really wanted was also very small. When they realized the dysfunction of the system, they would be discouraged from making contributions to it further. On the contrary, if there are a lot of participants who are willing to keep online and contribute resources, the probability that a user finds what she really needs in the system would become much higher. The user who benefits from the system would perceive the system as useful and tend to log on more often, keep online longer, and make more contributions. Therefore, users’ participation, as well as the value of the system would increase in a snowball effect.

Obviously, there exists a feedback loop in peer-to-peer systems. That is, the size of the community of users may directly determine the level of usefulness of a system and the usefulness of the system can influence the number of participants in reverse [3]. In order to have this feedback loop work on a peer-to-peer system in a positive way, motivations are needed to attract the users to join and stimulate them to contribute.

Keywords

Motivation, peer-to-peer system, social psychology, online community, hierarchical memberships

1. INTRODUCTION

Peer-to-peer systems have become more and more popular in recent years. Some applications have proved to be successful, for example, Napster, Kazaa, and edoney. Since peer-to-peer systems are a kind of decentralized distributed systems, their reliability is usually superior to the traditional server-oriented systems. However, in a peer-to-peer system, there are no powerful servers which provide various services or information for the clients. All the users of the system are equal peers, which act as both servers and clients. What a user can get from the system completely depends on what other users contribute to the system. If few users are willing to participate in the community or make contributions to it, the peer-to-peer system will never become a successful one no matter how excellent the technology it applies is in terms of protocol, performance, etc.

A P2P application, called COMTELLA [1] has been implemented at the Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. It is a Gnutella-based peer-to-peer application which enables a community of researchers and students to share and exchange resources, such as research papers [2]. Although the system was mature in terms of technique, it can not provide good service because the number of participants was small. Moreover, some participants were actually free riders who typically entered

2. PREVIOUS WORK

2.1 Related social psychology theories

How to motivate people to participate in a peer-to-peer system and make contributions to it? Generally, a peer-to-peer system, together with its users, creates an online society, which shares some features with real human societies. Therefore, some theories of social psychology could be used as the foundations of the strategies to motivate users’ participation and contributions.

2.1.1 Reciprocation theory

Reciprocation is a basic norm of human society. Simply put, appropriate rewards are needed when we ask people to do something for us [4]. Therefore, if we want people to join our p2p community and make contributions to it, they should benefit from their participation and contributions. Actually, reciprocation is the basic of the motivation strategies of Kazaa Lite and Mojo Nation, two existing p2p systems. Both of the systems tried to reward the users who actively participated and made contributions to their communities. However, their mechanisms were not very successful. To improve the effectiveness of the strategies, two key questions must be thought over. One is how to measure the users’ participation and contributions. Since the amount of reward the user receives should depend on her participation and contributions, it is important to measure them accurately. Otherwise, the users

In recent years, peer-to-peer systems have become more and more popular, especially with some successful applications like Napter, Kazaa and edoney. However, how to motivate user participation in peer-to-peer systems remains an open question for researcher

may feel that the mechanism is unfair. Another crucial q …… 此处隐藏：39417字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……