Monday, November 19, 2007

Can Game Theory be Used to Loosen Website API Limits? Let's say Twitter limits me to getting only 20 tweets at a time through their API. But I want more. I may even want to do something so radical as download everything. Of course Twitter can't let everyone do that. They would be swamped serving all this traffic and service would be denied. So Twitter does that rational thing and limits API access as a means of self protection. As does google, yahoo, and everyone else. But when I hit the limit I think, but hey it's Todd here, we've been friends a long time and I've never abused you. Can't you just trust me a little? I promise not to hurt you. I never have and won't in the future. At least on purpose, accidents do happen. The problem is Twitter doesn't know me so we haven't built up trust. We could replace trust with money, as in a paid service where I pay for each batch of downloads, but we're better friends than that. Money shouldn't come between us. And if Twitter knew what a good guy I was I feel sure they would let me download more data. But Twitter doesn't know me and that's the problem. How could they know me? We could set up authority based systems like the ones that let certain people through the airport security lines fast, but that won't scale and I have feeling we all know how that strategy will work out. Another approach to trust is a game theoretic perspective for assessing a user's trust leve. Take the iterated prisoner's dilemma problem where "tit for tat" is a surprisingly simple winning strategy. We start out cooperating and if you screw me I'll screw you right back. In a situation where communication is spotty (like through an API) there can be bad signals sent so if people have trusted before then they'll wait for another iteration to see if the other side defects again, in which case they retaliate. It seems like if services modeled the API like a game and assessed my capabilities by how we've played the game together, then capabilities could be set based on earned and demonstrated trust rather than simplistic rules. A service like Mashery can take this approach a step further because they can assess how a player plays in a wider playing field. If someone vouches for you to a friend then you will likely get more slack because you have some of the trust from your friend backing you. This doesn't work in one on one situation because there's no way to establish your reputation. Mashery on the other hand knows you and knows which APIs you are using and how you are using them. Mashery could vouch for you if they detected you were playing fair so you get more capabilities initially and transit the capability scale faster if you continued to behave. Of course we get the situations like on Ebay where people spend eons setting up great reputation only to trade their reputations in for cash in some fabulous scam. That's what happens in a society though. We all get more for the price of some risk. comment[] 10:19:05 AM       digg   reddit

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