16,954 research outputs found
Road User Charging – Pricing Structures.
This project considers the extent to which the public could cope with complex price or tariff structures such as those that might be considered in the context of a national congestion pricing scheme. The key elements of the brief were:
• to review existing studies of road pricing schemes to assess what information and evidence already exists on the key issues;
• to identify what can be learned about pricing structures from other transport modes and other industries and in particular what issues and conclusions might be transferable;
• to improve the general understanding of the relationship between information and people’s ability to respond; and
• to recommend what further research would be most valuable to fill evidence gaps and enable conclusions to be drawn about an effective structure
The Economics of Network Neutrality
Pricing of Internet access has been characterized by two properties. Parties are directly billed only by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) through which they connect to the Internet and the ISP charges them on the basis of the amount of information transmitted rather than its content. These properties define a regime known as “network neutrality.” In 2005, some large ISPs proposed that application and content providers directly pay them additional fees for accessing the ISPs’ residential clients, as well as differential fees for prioritizing certain content. We analyze the private and social incentives to introduce such fees when the network is congested and more traffic implies delays. We find that network neutrality is welfare superior to bandwidth subdivision (granting or selling priority service). We also consider the welfare properties of the various regimes that have been proposed as alternatives to network neutrality. In particular, we show that the benefit of a zero-price “slow lane” is a function of the bandwidth the regulator mandates be allocated it. Extending the analysis to consider ISPs’ incentives to invest in more bandwidth, we show that, under general conditions, their incentives are greatest when they can price discriminate; this investment incentive offsets to some degree the allocative distortion created by the introduction of price discrimination. A priori, it is ambiguous whether the offset is sufficient to justify departing from network neutrality.network neutrality, two-sided markets, Internet, monopoly, price discrimination, regulation, congestion
Users' traffic on two-sided Internet platforms. Qualitative dynamics
Internet platforms' traffic defines important characteristics of platforms,
such as pricing of services, advertisements, speed of operations. One can
estimate the traffic with the traditional time series models like ARIMA,
Holt-Winters, functional and kernel regressions. When using these methods, we
usually smooth-out noise and various external effects in the data and obtain
short-term predictions of processes. However, these models do not necessarily
help us to understand the underlying mechanism and the tendencies of the
processes. In this article, we discuss the dynamical system approach to the
modeling, which is designed to discover the underlying mechanism and the
qualitative properties of the system's phase portrait. We show how to
reconstruct the governing differential equations from data. The external
effects are modeled as system's parameters (initial conditions). Utilizing this
new approach, we construct the models for the volume of users, interacting
through Internet platforms, such as "Amazon.com", "Homes.mil" or
"Wikipedia.org". Then, we perform qualitative analysis of the system's phase
portrait and discuss the main characteristics of the platforms
Boltzmann meets Nash: Energy-efficient routing in optical networks under uncertainty
Motivated by the massive deployment of power-hungry data centers for service
provisioning, we examine the problem of routing in optical networks with the
aim of minimizing traffic-driven power consumption. To tackle this issue,
routing must take into account energy efficiency as well as capacity
considerations; moreover, in rapidly-varying network environments, this must be
accomplished in a real-time, distributed manner that remains robust in the
presence of random disturbances and noise. In view of this, we derive a pricing
scheme whose Nash equilibria coincide with the network's socially optimum
states, and we propose a distributed learning method based on the Boltzmann
distribution of statistical mechanics. Using tools from stochastic calculus, we
show that the resulting Boltzmann routing scheme exhibits remarkable
convergence properties under uncertainty: specifically, the long-term average
of the network's power consumption converges within of its
minimum value in time which is at most ,
irrespective of the fluctuations' magnitude; additionally, if the network
admits a strict, non-mixing optimum state, the algorithm converges to it -
again, no matter the noise level. Our analysis is supplemented by extensive
numerical simulations which show that Boltzmann routing can lead to a
significant decrease in power consumption over basic, shortest-path routing
schemes in realistic network conditions.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure
Network Neutrality or Internet Innovation?
Over the past two decades, the Internet has undergone an extensive re-ordering of its topology that has resulted in increased variation in the price and quality of its services. Innovations such as private peering, multihoming, secondary peering, server farms, and content delivery networks have caused the Internet’s traditionally hierarchical architecture to be replaced by one that is more heterogeneous. Relatedly, network providers have begun to employ an increasingly varied array of business arrangements and pricing. This variation has been interpreted by some as network providers attempting to promote their self interest at the expense of the public. In fact, these changes reflect network providers’ attempts to reduce cost, manage congestion, and maintain quality of service. Current policy proposals to constrain this variation risk harming these beneficial developments.
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