title: Impact of heterogeneity and socioeconomic factors on individual behavior in decentralized sharing ecosystems.
abstract: Tens of millions of individuals around the world use decentralized content distribution systems, a fact of growing social, economic, and technological importance. These sharing systems are poorly understood because, unlike in other technosocial systems, it is difficult to gather large-scale data about user behavior. Here, we investigate user activity patterns and the socioeconomic factors that could explain the behavior. Our analysis reveals that (i) the ecosystem is heterogeneous at several levels: content types are heterogeneous, users specialize in a few content types, and countries are heterogeneous in user profiles; and (ii) there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic indicators of a country and users behavior. Our findings open a research area on the dynamics of decentralized sharing ecosystems and the socioeconomic factors affecting them, and may have implications for the design of algorithms and for policymaking.
authors.affiliation: Departaments d'Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques and d'Enginyeria Química, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43007 Tarragona, Spain; Departments of Chemical and Biological Engineering.
authors.forename: Arnau
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gavaldà-Miralles
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-2350; and.
authors.forename: David R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Choffnes
authors.affiliation: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and.
authors.forename: John S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Otto
authors.affiliation: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and.
authors.forename: Mario A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Sánchez
authors.affiliation: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and.
authors.forename: Fabián E
authors.initials: FE
authors.lastname: Bustamante
authors.affiliation: Departments of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208;
authors.forename: Luís A N
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Amaral
authors.affiliation: Departaments d'Enginyeria Informàtica i Matemàtiques and jordi.duch@urv.cat.
authors.forename: Jordi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Duch
authors.affiliation: d'Enginyeria Química, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43007 Tarragona, Spain; Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), 08010 Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Roger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Guimerà
mesh_terms: D001519:Behavior; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D017753:Ecosystem; D006801:Humans; D011057:Politics; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors
keywords: BitTorrent; Internet; content sharing; human activity; privacy