Multiagent Systems

The guys at Harvard's EconCS joined forces with Delft's tribler team (a video streaming application) to deliver an interesting new peer to peer file sharing client which claims to provide better download speeds and be immune to some of the freeriding problems of the basic bittorrent protocol (press release).

This article makes it sound like they have even grander plans:

"Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users. Thus, they are both efficient and powerful computational and economic systems," David Parkes, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard said. "Peer-to-peer has received a bad rap, however, because of its frequent association with illegal music or software downloads."

The researchers were inspired to use a version of the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because of such flexibility, speed, and reliability.

"Our platform will provide fast downloads by ensuring sufficient uploads," explains Johan Pouwelse, an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology and the technical director of Tribler. "The next generation of peer-to-peer systems will provide an ideal marketplace not just for content, but for bandwidth in general."

The researchers envision an e-commerce model that connects users to a single global market, without any controlling company, network, or bank with bandwidth as the first true Internet "currency" for such a market.

They are proposing earn-and-spend market model, where the more a user uploads now and the higher the quality of the contributions, the more she would be able to download later and the faster the download speed.

Another idea the researchers believe has enormous but untapped potential is the combination of social network technology with peer-to-peer systems.

I don't know if they will succeed, but I am sure these ideas will.