In class we talked about the bipartite graph auction procedure (BGAP) and how it can be used to find a set of market clearing prices – that is, a set of prices whereby a perfect matching of sellers to buyers exists. As discussed, the resulting preferred-seller graph given by the BGAP is socially optimal - […]

Despite the often misreported news articles on biology, there is no clear cut function of a single biological component such as a protein, gene or metabolite. There is no “gene” for lung cancer, rather, there is a genetic network that when perturbed, causes lung cancer. What is more important is a biological component’s relationship with […]

Behind the beautiful models, shiny-headed charismatic host, and shaddowy banker figure lies a deceptive mathematical game. Contestants on Deal or No Deal are asked to choose one case out of 26 which are presented to them by 26 lovely models. Each case contains an amount of money between one penny and […]

Links
BBC News - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/more_or_less/5176698.stm
Judith Kleinfeld’s website - http://www.judithkleinfeld.com/
After hearing about the small-world phenomenon and six degrees of separation, it seemed appropriate to search for recent attempts to duplicate Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment from 1967. Some experiments mentioned in lecture today, such as the e-mail experiment by Dodds, Muhammed, and Watts, came up multiple times in […]

This paper, written by Microsoft in 2007, is a little old, but it offers some interesting insight into an aspect of advertisement selling for search engines that we didn’t cover in class: variance in CTR among advertisements.
Search engines have an incentive to place well-clicking advertisements in prominent positions because doing so leads to more […]

In class we discussed the basic example of how Google determines which advertiser gets which slot in the sponsored search results.  However, Google does not just care about the bid of each advertiser.  It is easy to spend money while creating a relevant ad and site require significant amounts of time.  As […]

http://www.ebay.com/ 
          The phenomenon of eBay is, for all intents and purposes, the pinnacle of the auction idea in our modern society.  In its original form, it was a first-price open-bid auction format and revolutionized the way e-business was conducted virtually overnight.  As the site has grown and re-invented itself, a number of important aspects of […]

Although a bit mathematically dense, “A Survey of Gossiping and Broadcasting in Communication Networks” is an interesting study on communication within networks. The article, described at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/113394325/PDFSTART, breaks down these communication problems into two general categories: “gossip” and “broadcasting.” For both types, each person in a network is represented by a node […]

In discussing very large real networks, such as the internet, analyzing small sets of individual nodes and edges can give interesting insight into some of the structure of the network, but how can we generalize this analysis to formally include all of the nodes and edges in a network where the number of nodes is […]

In many cases, the analysis that game theory provides does not seem to validate experimental observations. The best example of this can be seen in network exchange theory - where people simply refuse to accept what they believe are unfair offers. One of the classical explanations for this phenomenon arises from the Ultimatum Game, where […]