Call For Papers

The Second Workshop on the Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems follows the inaugural workshop, which was held at Berkeley in June, 2003. We have a diverse program committee, comprised of researchers from distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and economics, and anticipate a highly interdisciplinary workshop.

From file-sharing to distributed computation, from application layer overlays to mobile ad hoc networking, the ultimate success of a peer-to-peer system rests on the twin pillars of scalable and robust system design and alignment of economic interests among the participating peers. Following the success of the first workshop, the Second Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems will again bring together researchers and practitioners from multiple disciplines to discuss the economic characteristics of P2P systems, application of economic theories to P2P system design, and future directions and challenges in this area.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- incentives and disincentives for cooperation 
- distributed algorithmic mechanism design 
- reputation and trust 
- reliability, identity, and attack resistance 
- network externalities and scale economies 
- public goods and club formation 
- accounting and settlement mechanisms 
- payment and currency systems 
- user behavior and system performance 
- measurement studies 
- leveraging heterogeneity without compromising anonymity 
- economic impact to network providers 
- interconnection of P2P networks 

The program of the workshop will be a combination of invited talks, paper presentations, and discussion. Workshop attendance will be limited to ensure a productive environment.

Each potential participant should submit a position paper that expresses a novel or interesting problem, offers a specific solution, reports on actual experience, or advances a research agenda. Participants will be invited based on the originality, technical merit and topical relevance of their submissions, as well as the likelihood that the ideas expressed in their submissions will lead to insightful discussions at the workshop. Accepted papers will be published on the workshop website.