On studying relationship between altruism and the psychological phenomenon of self-deception in rational and autonomous networks

In open networking environments, resources, services, strategies and actions are voluntarily provided, maintained, chosen and determined by independent, rational and autonomous peers. Basically, Game theory is a basic tool for modeling choices by rational agents in those environments, which, usually assumes players choose strategies which maximize utility of game outcomes given their beliefs about what others players will do. This means that the most challenging question is often how beliefs are formed. Intuitively, beliefs depend not only on what people know to be true, but also on what they want to be true (desire). This paper introduces a model of rational choices that allows for this possibility that peers' beliefs are affected by their interests (desires), and, based on this model, analyzes the impact of psychological belief (optimistic bias and pessimistic bias) on the existing altruism-based cooperative mechanisms in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems. We found that, when there exist free riders, on the contrary to the intuitive thought, pessimistic bias of belief on contribution level can facilitate the P2P systems to converge to the stable equilibrium in easier way than optimistic bias.