Distributed computing models for sharing resources have become popular, but their widespread use for business applications has not been achieved. This book discusses why and explores new incentives for distributed systems in collaborative environments.

Distributed computing paradigms for sharing resources such as Clouds, Grids, Peer-to-Peer systems, or voluntary computing are becoming increasingly popular. While there are some success stories such as PlanetLab, OneLab, BOINC, BitTorrent, and SETI@home, a widespread use of these technologies for business applications has not yet been achieved. In a business environment, mechanisms are needed to provide incentives to potential users for participating in such networks. These mechanisms may range from simple non-monetary access rights, monetary payments to specific policies for sharing. Although a few models for a framework have been discussed (in the general area of a "Grid Economy"), none of these models has yet been realised in practice. This book attempts to fill this gap by discussing the reasons for such limited take-up and exploring incentive mechanisms for resource sharing in distributed systems. The purpose of this book is to identify research challenges in successfully using and deploying resource sharing strategies in open-source and commercial distributed systems.

Interdisciplinary approach that combines work from Economics and Computer Science Coordination and incentive problems prevalent to any kind of distributed system are analyzed by means of economic theory Economic theory is put to work by providing evidence (e.g. by prototypes) that the pure concepts are feasible to be implemented in the field Theoretical work is illustrated with experiences from state-of-the-art European projects Addresses many new insights into how to approach coordination and incentive problems Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Economic Models and Algorithms for Distributed Systems.- Economic Models and Algorithms for Distributed Systems.- Reputation Mechanisms and Trust.- A Belief-based Trust Model for Dynamic Service Selection.- Reputation, Princing and the E-Science Grid.- Trust-oriented Utility-based Community Structure in Multiagent Systems.- Formation of Virtual Organizations in Grids: A Game-Theoretic Approach.- Towards Dynamic Authentication in the Grid Secure and Mobile Business Workflows Using GSet.- Service Level Agreements.- Enforcing Service Level Agreements Using an Economically Enhanced Resource Manager.- Extended Resource Management Using Client Classification and Economic Enhancements.- Mitigating Provider Uncertainty in Service Provision Contracts.- Text-Content-Analysis based on the Syntactic Correlations between Ontologies.- Business Models and Market Mechanisms.- Cloud Computing Value Chains: Understanding Businesses and Value Creation in the Cloud.- A Model for Determining the Optimal Capacity Investment for Utility Computing.- A Combinatorial Exchange for Complex Grid Services.- Heuristic Scheduling in Grid Environments: Reducing the Operational Energy Demand.- Facing Price Risks in Internet-of-Services Markets.