Economics-Informed Design of Networked Systems

Economics and network design have always been intimately intertwined. The infrastructural nature of networks, the decentralization of ownership and control, and the derivation of utility by heterogeneous users and applications, all point to the need for incorporating economic considerations into the design of networks.

In this research seminar, we will read and discuss recent papers exploring the many different areas in which network design and economics intersect, including: economic characteristics of networks, modeling strategic behavior in network games, information asymmetries in networked environments, incentive engineering and market-based resource allocation, etc., with applications to Internet architecture, peer-to-peer, ad-hoc, and overlay networks, and network security, etc.