Analysis of Strategies to Promote Cooperation in Distributed Service Discovery

New systems can be designed, developed, and managed as societies of agents that interact with each other by offering and providing services. These systems can be viewed as complex networks where nodes are bounded rational agents. In order to deal with complex goals, they require the cooperation of the other agents to be able to locate the required services. In this paper, we present a theoretical model that formalizes the interactions among agents in a search process. We present a repeated game model where the actions that are involved in the search process have an associated cost. Also, if the task arrives to an agent that can perform it, there is a reward for agents that collaborated by forwarding queries. We propose a strategy that is based on random-walks, and we study under what conditions the strategy is a Nash Equilibrium. We performed several experiments in order to validate the model and the strategy and to analyze which network structures are more appropriate to promote cooperation.