Effort-based incentives for resource sharing in collaborative volunteer applications

Collaborative and volunteer applications need to implement incentive mechanisms to regulate resource sharing and encourage network nodes to contribute for reaching a certain goal. Typically, these incentive mechanisms assign resources to network node requests, based on the total amount of resources contributed by the requesting participant. This approach assumes that participants contributing more should also get back more resources from the collaborative environment. This assumption turns the system unfair to those participants with scarce resources, because they have just few resources to share. This paper proposes the use of an incentive strategy based on the contribution percentage of each node; i.e. an effort-based approach. This proposal is evaluated and compared to contribution-based strategies. The obtained results show that the proposed effort-based approach not only benefits participants that have scarce resources, but also it is able to satisfy the requests of the powerful nodes.