Presence-Exchanges: Toward Sustainable Presence-Sharing

Presence-sharing is a promising platform for cooperative location-aware applications, but applications must provide direct benefit to users for their presence information. If not, these services give users strong incentives to free-load to avoid privacy risks and administrative burden. Modeling presence-sharing as an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma shows that it is not sustainable under these conditions. Thus, to create sustainable presence-sharing, we propose introducing a trusted broker to transform the game from a Prisoner’s Dilemma to a transactional exchange.