Game Authority for Robust and Scalable Distributed Selfish Computer Systems

Paper in proceeding, 2007

Game theory analyzes social structures of agents that have freedom of choice within a moral code. The society allows freedom and selfishness within the moral code, which social structures enforce, i.e., legislative, executive, and judicial. Social rules encourage individual profit from which the entire society gains. Distributed computer systems can improve their scalability and robustness by using explicit social structures. We propose using a game authority middleware for enforcing the moral code on selfish agents. The power of game theory is in predicting the game outcome for specific assumptions. The prediction holds as long as the players cannot tamper with the social structure, or change the rules of the game, i.e., the prisoner cannot escape from prison in the classical prisoner dilemma. Therefore, we cannot predict the game outcome without suitable assumptions on failures and honest selfishness.