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Economics of peer-to-peer systems

October 16th, 2009 at 13:37 UTC by Ross Anderson

A new paper, Olson’s Paradox Revisited: An Empirical Analysis of File-Sharing Behaviour in P2P Communities, finds a positive correlation between the size of a BitTorrent file-sharing community and the amount of content shared, despite a reduced individual propensity to share in larger groups, and deduces from this that file-sharing communities provide a pure (non-rival) public good. Forcing users to upload results in a smaller caatalogue; but private networks provide both more and better content, as do networks aimed at specialised communities.

George Danezis and I produced a theoretical model of this five years ago in The Economics of Censorship Resistance. It’s nice to see that the data, now collected, bear us out

Entry filed under: Academic papers, Internet censorship, Security economics