Egoistic Incentives Based on Zero-Determinant Alliances for Large-Scale Systems

Social dilemmas exist in various fields and give rise to the so-called free-riding problem, leading to collective fiascos. The difficulty of tracking individual behaviors makes egoistic incentives in large-scale systems a challenging task. However, the state-of-the-art mechanisms are either individual-based or state-dependent, resulting in low efficiency in large-scale networks. In this paper, we propose an egoistic incentive mechanism from a connected (network) perspective rather than an isolated (individual) perspective by taking advantage of the social nature of people. We make use of a zero-determinant (ZD) strategy for rewarding cooperation and sanctioning defection. After proving cooperation is the dominant strategy for ZD players, we optimize their deployment to facilitate cooperation over the whole system. To further speed up cooperation, we derive a ZD alliance strategy for sequential multiple-player repeated games to empower ZD players with higher controllable leverage, which undoubtedly enriches the theoretical system of ZD strategies and broadens their application domain. Our approach is stateless and stable, which contributes to its scalability. Extensive simulations based on a real world trace data as well as synthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed egoistic incentive approach under different networking scenarios.