The main challenge in overlay multicasting is designing self-organizing mechanisms that can be able to exploit the inherent selfishness of the end-user nodes in such a way that the aggregate outcome of the activity of individual nodes behaving toward their own self-interests still leads to maximization of the networks aggregate utility. We believe that the microeconomic theory is a good candidate to investigate this problem. Since each consumer in the economy acts as a selfish utility maximizer, the behavior of each end-host in the overlay network can be mapped to that of a consumer in the economy.
