Passive Verification of the Strategyproofness of Mechanisms in Open Environments

Consider an open infrastructure in which anyone can deploy mechanisms to support automated decision making and coordination amongst self-interested computational agents. Strategyproofness is a central property in the design of such mechanisms, allowing participants to maximize their individual benefit by reporting truthful private information about preferences and capabilities and without modeling or reasoning about the behavior of other agents. But, why should participants trust that a mechanism is strategyproof? We address this problem, proposing and describing a passive verifier, able to monitor the inputs and outputs of mechanisms and verify the strategyproofness, or not, of a mechanism. Useful guarantees are available to participants before the behavior of the mechanism is completely known, and metrics are introduced to provide a measure of partial verification. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.Engineering and Applied Science

Economic Policy Analysis and the Internet: Coming to Terms with a Telecommunications Anomaly

The significant set of public policy issues for economic analysis that arise from the tensions between the ‘special benefits’ of the Internet as a platform for innovation, and the drawbacks of the “anomalous” features of the Internet viewed as simply one among the array of telecommunications systems, is the focus of discussion in this chapter. Economists concerned with industrial organization and regulation (including antitrust and merger law) initially found new scope for application of their expertise in conventional policy analyses of the Internet’s interactions with other segments of the telecommunications sector (broadcast and cable television, radio and telephone), and emphasized the potential congestion problems posed by user anonymity and flat rate pricing. Policy issues of a more dynamic kind have subsequently come to the fore. These involve classic tradeoffs between greater efficiency and producer and consumer surpluses today, and a potential for more innovation in Web-based products and service in the future. Many such tradeoffs involve choices such as that between policies that would preserve the original ‘end-to-end’ design of the original Internet architecture, and those that would be more encouraging of market-driven deployment of new technologies that afforded ISPs with greater market power the opportunity to offer (and extract greater profits from) restricted-Web services that consumers valued highly, such as secure and private VOIP.public policy, telecommunications, Web-based products, user anonymity

Mobile Termination Charges: Calling Party Pays versus Receiving Party Pays

There has been widespread concern at the level of mobile termination charges, leading to increasingly severe price controls. Oftel and the Competition Commission identified the Caller Pays Principle (CPP) as the source of the market power that enabled termination charges to be set above cost. Both accepted that the alternative Receiver Pays Principle (RPP) would solve the monopoly problem, but rejected it primarily because RPP might lead to significant numbers of users switching off their mobile phones. Evidence from RPP countries is consistent with RPP solving market power problems. CPP is almost certainly less efficient than RPP. US and other evidence suggests that the argument about customers switching off phones is not tenable. If the aim is efficient resource allocation, undistorted by excessive termination charges and subsidised handsets, to be achieved by competition rather than price controls, then RPP is preferable to CPP

Passive verification of the strategyproofness of mechanisms in open environments

(Article begins on next page) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Kang, Laura, and David C Parkes. 2006. Passive verification of the strategyproofness of mechanisms in open environments. I

Network Effects and Switching Costs In the Market for Routers and Switches

This research examines the impact of switching costs on vendor choice in the market for routers and switches. We show that despite the use of open standards which attempt to enhance interoperabilities for equipments from different vendors, vendors in this market are able to maintain high switching costs. Because routers and switches are networked goods, switching costs may arise from prior investments made at the same establishment and/or at other establishments within the same firm. We study how the introduction of switches into the LAN market affected vendor choice in routers. In particular, we provide evidence of significant cross-product switching costs and sizeable shopping costs when buyers purchase routers and switches simultaneously. However, we also show that the introduction of switches may have temporarily reduced switching costs for router buyers investing in switches

Give Away Your Digital Services: Leveraging Big Data to Capture Value

Consumers are getting used to receiving free services in many different fields, and the popularity of the mobile app industry is feeding this phenomenon. Historically, advertising—a typical two-sided market mechanism—is the primary method that companies relying on a free-to-consumers business model have used to appropriate value in digital environ- ments. But new strategies are needed to make free services sustainable and profitable in the long term. At the same time, companies are gathering a huge amount of data from consumers, especially through mobile apps, by leveraging the sensors embedded in smartphones; this data represents a powerful new source of value. Through a case study analysis, we show how leveraging a two-sided structure can enable companies to capture value from user-sourced data, enabling a sustainable free-to-consumers business model. In this model, users are more than eyeballs to be targeted with advertising; they become data providers, and companies may capture value by using that data to customize advertising messages, lever- age e-ethnography to improve their own core offer, serve as fodder for research, or create knowledge for third partie

The future of insurance intermediation in the age of the digital platform economy

Today most insurance is sold by over a million brokers and independent agents acting as intermediaries between the insurance companies and their customers. Digitalization and changing customer behavior have fostered the development of insurtech businesses, and, more recently, multi-sided platforms are emerging as new market forms for insurance intermediation. This paper aims to provide a better understanding of how the emergence of the platform economy with a market dominated by multi-sided platforms potentially impacts insurance intermediation in the future. Using inductive content analysis on the results of a systematic literature review of the body of research on insurance intermediation, we identify the key functional roles fulfilled by insurance intermediaries. Applying these roles to a literature review on multi-sided platforms allows us to compare how different market forms and players embody the functional roles of intermediaries. Our findings suggest that multi-sided platforms are better able to perform certain roles in terms of agility, scale and scope, and we discuss the future role of platforms in insurance intermediation

Platform Leadership: Managing Boundaries for the Network Growth of Digital Platforms

This study aims to generate a systematic understanding of how digital platform firms can attain platform leadership. We explore the question by casting a boundary management lens over the complex network of interactions on a digital platform. Firms are faced with various boundaries—boundaries of efficiency, competence, power, identity, and ties—and must carefully address tensions within diverse groups of actors with their own interests. We conducted an in-depth case study on China’s largest online ticketing firm and established two contributions for attaining platform leadership. First, we conceptualized the development of a digital platform as a set of technology-based boundary management mechanisms (functional multiplexing, scope expansion, community curation, actor empowerment, and positional escalation) that includes a combination of boundary spanning, erecting, and reinforcing. Second, we uncovered the network dynamics of a digital platform by explicating the synergies and tensions of boundary management. Considering our novel findings, this study offers managerial and design guidelines for a digital platform by advocating an integrative view of boundary management. We present a multidimensional framework that includes five boundaries and four types of networks (dyadic, interconnected, intraconnected, and external) for future analysis of networks built on digital platforms

Lobbying as Rhetorical Framing in the “Sharing Economy": a Case Study on the Limits and Crisis of the Evidence Based Policy Paradigm

This paper critically discusses the "sharing economy", highlighting the conceptual ambiguity and the rhetorics that characterise this emerging phenomenon and the regulatory and policy disputes that have arisen around it. The paper considers both consumption oriented platforms and platforms intermediating labour and identify a number of rhetorical narratives that are then contrasted with the available empirical evidence. It shows that the debates on the sharing economy are characterised by value disputes, uncertain facts, high stakes and the need of urgent decision; despite the lack of robust evidence, rhetorical discourses are used by powerful concentrated interests for lobbying based on a convenient framing of the policy agenda. As decisions on regulation are taken or not taken in conditions of scientific uncertainty and under the framing implemented by concentrated interests, the paper argues that the approach of policy makers and regulators to the sharing economy exemplifies vividly the crisis of the Evidence Based Policy paradigm

Telecommunications @ crossroads : the transition from a voice-centric to a data-centric communication network

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-64).by Philip Kyalo Mutooni.M.S