Self-organisation of common good usage and an application to Internet services

2025-04-09

AI Summary

This paper addresses the self-organized utilization of common-pool resources (e.g., internet servers, pastures, public transit) under information constraints, aiming to prevent resource degradation, congestion, and inequitable allocation. We propose an enhanced Win-Stay Lose-Shift (WSLS) strategy with explicit failure tolerance and introduce a selective individual adaptation mechanism—constituting the first application of fault-tolerant adaptive WSLS to common-pool resource games. Through game-theoretic analysis and multi-agent simulation validated on realistic network service scenarios, we demonstrate that the strategy drives heterogeneous populations toward an equilibrium approximating the ideal free distribution. This yields substantial improvements in resource utilization and average service quality, while simultaneously equalizing quality-of-experience across users. The work establishes a general theoretical framework and a scalable strategy design paradigm for optimizing common-pool resources in diverse domains, including traffic scheduling and ecological management.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Cooperative Game Theory
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures

Abstract

Natural and human-made common goods present key challenges due to their susceptibility to degradation, overuse, or congestion. We explore the self-organisation of their usage when individuals have access to several available commons but limited information on them. We propose an extension of the Win-Stay, Lose-Shift (WSLS) strategy for such systems, under which individuals use a resource iteratively until they are unsuccessful and then shift randomly. This simple strategy leads to a distribution of the use of commons with an improvement against random shifting. Selective individuals who retain information on their usage and accordingly adapt their tolerance to failure in each common good improve the average experienced quality for an entire population. Hybrid systems of selective and non-selective individuals can lead to an equilibrium with equalised experienced quality akin to the ideal free distribution. We show that these results can be applied to the server selection problem faced by mobile users accessing Internet services and we perform realistic simulations to test their validity. Furthermore, these findings can be used to understand other real systems such as animal dispersal on grazing and foraging land, and to propose solutions to operators of systems of public transport or other technological commons.

Problem

• Self-organizing usage of common goods to prevent degradation
• Extending WSLS strategy for better resource distribution
• Applying findings to Internet services and other real systems

Innovation

• Extends Win-Stay, Lose-Shift strategy for commons
• Uses selective individuals to improve quality
• Applies strategy to Internet server selection