Game Theoretical Analysis of Collaborative Social Applications

During the last decade, social applications have witnessed a rapid growth in their use. Millions of people are utilising them on a daily basis in order to share their experience, information and to communicate with their family members and friends. Lately, these technologies have been used to foster collaboration in education, however, it is a case of hit and miss and without established techniques to ensure or replicate success. A number of factors contribute to the limited success of such groups, one such factor is the presence of selfish members. A selfish user adopts a free riding behaviour that takes advantage of the collaborative group without contributing back. Such a behaviour will affect the group’s sustainability and affect the participants willingness to contribute. To improve the survival of educational groups in social applications, free riding behaviour needs to be studied, its impact on the group survivability assessed and then addressed. In this paper, we formally analyse the impact of the free riding behaviour by means of repeated game theory where classical and generous Tit-for-Tat are used.