Agent organization in the KP

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 181-191).In designing and building a network like the Internet, we continue to face the problems of scale and distribution. With the dramatic expansion in scale and heterogeneity of the Internet, network management has become an increasingly difficult task. Furthermore, network applications often need to maintain efficient organization among the participants by collecting information from the underlying networks. Such individual information collection activities lead to duplicate efforts and contention for network resources. The Knowledge Plane (KP) is a new common construct that provides knowledge and expertise to meet the functional, policy and scaling requirements of network management, as well as to create synergy and exploit commonality among many network applications. To achieve these goals, we face many challenging problems, including widely distributed data collection, efficient processing of that data, wide availability of the expertise, etc. In this thesis, to provide better support for network management and large-scale network applications, I propose a knowledge plane architecture that consists of a network knowledge plane (NetKP) at the network layer, and on top of it, multiple specialized KPs (spec-KPs). The NetKP organizes agents to provide valuable knowledge and facilities about the Internet to the spec-KPs. Each spec-KP is specialized in its own area of interest. In both the NetKP and the spec-KPs, agents are organized into regions based on different sets of constraints. I focus on two key design issues in the NetKP: (1) a region-based architecture for agent organization, in which I design an efficient and non-intrusive organization among regions that combines network topology and a distributed hash table; (2) request and knowledge dissemination, in which I design a robust and efficient broadcast and aggregation mechanism using a tree structure among regions.(cont.) In the spec-KPs, I build two examples: experiment management on the PlanetLab testbed and distributed intrusion detection on the DETER testbed. The experiment results suggest a common approach driven by the design principles of the Internet and more specialized constraints can derive productive organization for network management and applications.by Ji Li.Ph.D

Buried in Paperwork: Excessive Reporting in Organizations

This paper offers an explanation why a principal may demand too much paperwork from a subordinate: Due to limited liability and moral hazard a principal is unable to appropriate all rents. Internal paperwork allows a more accurate monitoring of the agent and enables the principal to appropriate a larger part of the agent's rent. In her decision the principal disregards the agent's cost increase of more internal paperwork. Consequently, the requested amount of internal paperwork may be too high from both the agent's personal point of view and the organization as a whole

A Tight Lower Bound on the Controllability of Networks with Multiple Leaders

In this paper we study the controllability of networked systems with static network topologies using tools from algebraic graph theory. Each agent in the network acts in a decentralized fashion by updating its state in accordance with a nearest-neighbor averaging rule, known as the consensus dynamics. In order to control the system, external control inputs are injected into the so called leader nodes, and the influence is propagated throughout the network. Our main result is a tight topological lower bound on the rank of the controllability matrix for such systems with arbitrary network topologies and possibly multiple leaders

Multi-level agent-based modeling with the Influence Reaction principle

This paper deals with the specification and the implementation of multi-level agent-based models, using a formal model, IRM4MLS (an Influence Reaction Model for Multi-Level Simulation), based on the Influence Reaction principle. Proposed examples illustrate forms of top-down control in (multi-level) multi-agent based-simulations

Delegation and incentives

This paper analyses the relation between authority and incentives. It extends the standard principal / agent model by a project selection stage in which the principal can either delegate the choice of project to the agent or keep the authority. The agent's subsequent choice of e ort depends both on monetary incentives and the selected project. We nd that the consideration of e ort incentives makes the principal less likely to delegate the authority over projects to the agent. In fact, if the agent is protected by limited liability, delegation is never optimal. --Authority,delegation,incentives,moral hazard,principal / agent problem,limited liability

Buried in Paperwork: Excessive Reporting in Organizations

This paper explains why a principal may demand too much paperwork from a subordinate: Due to limited liability and moral hazard a principal is unable to appropriate all rents. Internal paperwork allows a more accurate monitoring of the agent and enables the principal to appropriate a larger part of the agent's rent. In her decision the principal disregards the agent's cost increase of more internal paperwork. Consequently, the requested amount of internal paperwork may be too high from both the agent's personal point of view and the organization as a whole.principal-agent theory, mechanism design, deterministic mechanisms, randomization.

Buried in Paperwork: Excessive Reporting in Organizations

This paper offers an explanation why a principal may demand too much paperwork from a subordinate: Due to limited liability and moral hazard a principal is unable to appropriate all rents. Internal paperwork allows a more accurate monitoring of the agent and enables the principal to appropriate a larger part of the agent's rent. In her decision the principal disregards the agent's cost increase of more internal paperwork. Consequently, the requested amount of internal paperwork may be too high from both the agent's personal point of view and the organization as a whole.

Group Lending and Its Implications in Credit Markets for Poor People

Group lending has proved to be a successful form of lending in credit markets for poor people. In this paper, the policy of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is modeled. It is shown that under certain conditions making borrowers jointly liable for their loans can induce repayment even in the absence of formal credit enforcement mechanisms. A distinction is made between ability and willingness to repay. Both aspects crucially depend on the social setting and on the loan size. If social ties are too loose, the social pressure generated by joint liability is not sufficient to induce borrowers to repay. This constraint is more binding in the case of micro-credits.Micro credit, Group-lending, Collateral, Bangladesh, Grameen Bank