A Taxonomy of Incentive Patterns – The Design Space of Incentives for Cooperation

@TECHREPORT{ON03b,
  author = {Philipp Obreiter and Jens Nimis},
  month = {May},
  year = 2003,
  title = {A Taxonomy of Incentive Patterns - the Design Space of Incentives
          for Cooperation},
  number = {2003-9},
  institution = {Universit"at Karlsruhe, Faculty of Informatics},
  abstract = {In ad hoc networks, devices must cooperate in order to
             compensate for the absence of infrastructure. Yet, autonomous
             devices are free to decide whether to cooperate or not. Hence,
             incentives are indispensable to induce cooperation between
             autonomous devices. Recently, several approaches have been
             suggested that stimulate cooperation among devices. In this
             report, we point out that these approaches fall short of
             exploiting the design space of incentives for cooperation.
             Therefore, we introduce incentive patterns as a means of
             systematically conceiving incentive schemes with respect to the
             specifics of the application environment. Based on economics, we
             derive several incentive patterns and discuss them with respect
             to a set of general characteristics. Consequently, we propose a
             taxonomy that classifies the derived incentive patterns. Lastly,
             we exemplify systematic design of incentive schemes in the
             context of our DIANE project.}
}