As a way to summarize some of the activity on the Networks class blog, the course staff will be posting to a “digest blog” that will run in parallel with the main class blog. Once the blog schedule gets up to full speed next week, there will be more content than we can possibly hope […]

A number of recent posts have discussed examples of technological compatibility in terms of network effects. beata385 and njr25 each discuss HD DVD and Blu-Ray, while brucelee26 considers the transition from Windows XP to Vista — an interesting example, since instead of two competing firms, we have a single company trying to shift its users […]

A number of recent posts have been looking at models of how agents interact on networks, sometimes strategically and sometimes more simply. proneax discusses research on designing solutions to traffic congestion, in the spirit of our discussion of the Braess Paradox. This topic was also the focus of Tim Roughgarden’s research with Eva Tardos when […]

Several posts discussed the economic and social systems that underpin virtual worlds and creative works. catrionag describes some of the markets and auction systems used to allocate items in World of Warcraft and similar MMORPGs. There are interesting parallels here with many of the issues that have come up in class. Interesting questions have also […]

In the last few days on the class blog:
cosmohr writes about the FCC spectrum auction, and discusses how it illustrates a number of principles we’ve discussed in lecture, as well as many further complexities that can arise. It’s interesting that the spectrum auction puts in an appearance at the end of Sylvia Nasar’s much acclaimed […]

Now that blogging for the Networks course has begun in earnest, we would like to introduce a “digest blog” that will run in parallel with the main class blog.
The motivation for a digest is simple. There is already a lot of interesting content on the class blog, much more will be coming, and we […]