Modeling Collaboration in Academia: A Game Theoretic Approach

In this work, we aim to understand the mechanisms driving academic collaboration. We begin by building a model for how researchers split their effort between multiple papers, and how collaboration affects the number of citations a paper receives, supported by observations from a large real-world publication and citation dataset, which we call the h-Reinvestment model. Using tools from the field of Game Theory, we study researchers' collaborative behavior over time under this model, with the premise that each researcher wants to maximize his or her academic success. We find analytically that there is a strong incentive to collaborate rather than work in isolation, and that studying collaborative behavior through a game-theoretic lens is a promising approach to help us better understand the nature and dynamics of academic collaboration.Comment: Presented at the 1st WWW Workshop on Big Scholarly Data (2014). 6 pages, 5 figure

Modeling Service Interaction Networks

Service systems rely on internal interactions of service provider agents and the external interactions with customers in the design and delivery of services. Careful analysis and modeling of such interactions are essential to the design of effective service systems. This research focuses on service interaction networks in the context of the design and delivery of information technology (IT)-centric services. We develop and test a model of service interaction network effectiveness and investigate the effects of some of its structural properties on the effectiveness of service systems. We empirically analyze the validity of the model by using data from SourceForge.net and develop and test a set of specific hypotheses. The results indicate that network centrality and the network density have negative impacts whereas network size has positive influence on on service systems effectiveness