We study a symmetric independent private values auction model where the revenue-maximizing seller faces a cost cn of attracting n bidders to the auction. If the distribution of valuations possesses an increasing failure rate (IFR), the seller overinvests in attracting bidders compared to the social optimum. Conversely, if the distribution is DFR, the seller underinvests compared to the social o...

This work focuses on the B2B interaction between a service requester and a service provider in a healthcare environment. The requester is the primary caregiver responsible for managing the health of a population of patients. When a patient requires advanced care outside the requester’s expertise, the requester refers the patient to a provider and pays for the referral services. Treatment may su...

The maximum s-plex problem is an important model for social network analysis and other studies. In this study, we present an effective frequency-driven multineighborhood tabu search algorithm (FD-TS) to solve the problem on very large networks. The proposed FD-TS algorithm relies on two transformation operators (Add and Swap) to locate high-quality solutions, and a frequency-driven perturbation...

We consider model social networks in which information propagates directionally across layers of rational agents. Each agent makes a locally optimal estimate of the state of the world, and communicates this estimate to agents downstream. When agents receive information from the same source their estimates are correlated. We show that the resulting redundancy can lead to the loss of information ...

Social Overlays suffer from high message delivery delays due to insufficient routing strategies. Limiting connections to device pairs that are owned by individuals with a mutual trust relationship in real life, they form topologies restricted to a subgraph of the social network of their users. While centralized, highly successful social networking services entail a complete privacy loss of thei...

Social interactions among individuals are abundant both in natural and domestic populations. Such social interactions cause phenotypes of individuals to depend on genes carried by other individuals, a phenomenon known as indirect genetic effects (IGE). Because IGEs have drastic effects on the rate and direction of response to selection, knowledge of their magnitude and relationship to direct ge...

In this lecture we discuss the quality of equilibria. Let us assume we have a global function which describes the social gain of all the players (“the common welfare”), achieving an optimum value of OPT . However, in a game in which every player attemps to maximize its private gain, a system could reach an equilibrium in which the social gain is not OPT . We would like to compare the “quality” ...