Enforcing Behaviour with Anonymity

We discuss applications of an underlying anonymous infrastructure to enforce fair behaviour on participants in a distributed resource-sharing system. This approach aims to prevent users from forming self-rewarding cliques in order to gain unfair advantages in the use of shared resources. We deliberately avoid considering the more traditional applications of anonymous systems in an attempt to show the potential for the use of restricted access to identifying user information in applications where privacy is not the main motivation. We also briefly explore the problem of enforcing anonymity on users who may not wish to be anonymous, and consider the effect that low-level identification may have on the overall behaviour that we seek to enforce.