Businesses are trying to explore new business opportunities in the newly emerging P2P technology applications. Motivating peer members through incentive mechanisms to supply contributions to the system and controlling free riding are suggested in this paper as important success factors for developing P2P-based business models. We review the psychology and community behavior literature in order to provide an explanation for the reasons why people get motivated to participate in P2P systems and to contribute to the peer community. Motivation can be classified into individual factors and interpersonal factors. Based on these factors, we develop incentive mechanisms that may help to induce peers to contribute and participate more and thus benefit the entire P2P system and community. In particular, we propose the inclusion of the following four features into P2P application environments: (i) contribution-reward mechanism, (ii) individual identity and profile generation, (iii) sub-community building, and (iv) peer recommendations.

The authors of this paper have proposed that users are motivated to contribute in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems due to a number of individual and interpersonal factors. The individual factors include reward, personal need, altruism and reputation while the interpersonal factors are liking and affiliation. Based on this model, four system features (mentioned in the abstract above) are proposed for implementation in P2P systems. Future research is planned to identify the impact of these system features in motivating user contributions.

• Community behaviour
• Contribution-reward mechanism
• Individual identity and profile generation
• Sub-community building
• Peer recommendations
• Individual and interpersonal motivational factors
• Theory of information sharing