Management Science and Engineering 336
Market Models for Networked Systems

Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:15 PM-2:30 PM
Terman Engineering Center, Room 453
3 units

Instructor:

Ramesh Johari
Assistant Professor
Management Science and Engineering
Electrical Engineering (by courtesy)
Terman Engineering Center, Room 319
E-mail: ramesh.johari@stanford.edu
Office hours: Mondays, 2:30 PM-3:30 PM, Terman 319
Additional office hours by appointment

Course description:

This course aims to provide a rigorous introduction to problems at the interface between economics and engineering, for doctoral students with a research interest in the area. Students will be introduced to key concepts from game theory and market design, with an emphasis on network applications. The course will particularly emphasize constraints placed on market mechanisms due to the architecture of networks. While the course will primarily be taught in lecture format, the focus will be on encouraging discussion of open questions and modeling issues.

Course overview

List of recommended reading

Lecture topics:

Lecture 1
3/30/05

Overview, introduction to course material, examples
Lecture 2
4/4/05

Utilities, outcomes, efficiency, fairness, Arrow's impossibility theorem, social choice theory and web page ranking (Altman and Tennenholtz)
Lecture 3
4/6/05

Continuation of web page ranking, introduction to partial (competitive) equilibrium analysis
Lecture 4
4/11/05

Partial (competitive) equilibrium, Kelly's competitive equilibrium model in networks
Lecture 5
4/13/05

General equilibrium, informational efficiency (Mount and Reiter, Segal)
Lecture 6
4/18/05

Introduction to noncooperative game theory: dominant strategy equilibrium, Nash equilibrium, Bayesian equilibrium
Lecture 7
4/20/05

Dominant strategy implementation; the VCG mechanism
Lecture 8
4/25/05

The VCG mechanism in practice; algorithmic mechanism design (Nisan and Ronen), interdomain routing (Feigenbaum et al.)
Lecture 9
4/27/05

Introduction to Bayesian implementation
Lecture 10
5/2/05

Revenue equivalence theorem; Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem
Lecture 11
5/4/05

Optimal auction design; introduction to Nash implementation
Lecture 12
5/9/05

Nash implementation and Maskin monotonicity
Lecture 13
5/11/05

Maskin's mechanism; summary of implementation theory
Lecture 14
5/16/05

Kelly's mechanism for resource allocation
Lecture 15
5/18/05

Mechanism design for network resource allocation
Lecture 16
5/23/05

Mechanism design for network resource allocation (continued)
Lecture 17
5/25/05

Network formation games