Externalities and stability in social cloud

Abstract

Social Clouds have been gaining importance because of their potential for efficient and stable resource sharing without any (monetary) cost implications. There is a need, however, to look at how a social structure or relationship evolves to build a Social Cloud (by identifying factors that affect the social structure) and how social structure impacts individual resource sharing behavior. This paper presents a pairwise resource (or pairwise service) sharing social network model to explore the interdependence between social structure and resource (service) availability for an individual user or player. The paper also investigates effects of social structure on individual resource availability. Further, the paper analyzes positive and negative externalities, and aims to characterize stable social clouds. © 2014 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.