  Social dilemmas exist in various fields and give rise to the so-called
free-riding problem, leading to collective fiascos. The difficulty of tracking
individual behaviors makes egoistic incentives in large-scale systems a
challenging task. However, the state-of-the-art mechanisms are either
individual-based or state-dependent, resulting in low efficiency in large-scale
networks. In this paper, we propose an egoistic incentive mechanism from a
connected (network) perspective rather than an isolated (individual)
perspective by taking advantage of the social nature of people. We make use of
a zero-determinant (ZD) strategy for rewarding cooperation and sanctioning
defection. After proving cooperation is the dominant strategy for ZD players,
we optimize their deployment to facilitate cooperation over the whole system.
To further speed up cooperation, we derive a ZD alliance strategy for
sequential multiple-player repeated games to empower ZD players with higher
controllable leverage, which undoubtedly enriches the theoretical system of ZD
strategies and broadens their application domain. Our approach is stateless and
stable, which contributes to its scalability. Extensive simulations based on a
real world trace data as well as synthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness
of our proposed egoistic incentive approach under different networking
scenarios.
