Ebay Auctions and Dominant Strategies
At some point during this semester, after we had established the dominant strategy on sealed bid second price auctions, I found myself on ebay bidding for items. I mistakenly identified ebay’s auction format as the same as what we studied in class and assumed that all that I should to is decide my value and […]
Why you shouldn’t buy and sell links that pass PageRank
In class we talked a lot about PageRank, and went over a simplified model of how Google assigns scores to make the most pertinent sites appear at the top of the list of search results. In reality, the PageRank algorithm we learned in class, where hub and authority scores are assigned to a given node […]
Exploring Peer to Peer (P2P) Networks
Source: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/bittorrent.htm This article explains how the peer to peer torrent protocol works for downloading files extremely quickly and efficiently. Traditionally when you want to download a file from the internet, you are probably following the client-server protocol to get that file. Your Web browser on your computer, the client, tells the server, a middle-man […]
How much does pagerank matter?
Google’s pagerank has been around for a while, but it’s slowly losing its prominence. Pagerank basically takes the number of outbound links from a website as well as the number of inbound links to a website in order to determine how relevant a website is. For example, it a PR6 website with 1000 outbound links […]
Getting Quality Traffic to a Site
In class, we learnt about authorities and hubs and how a page has a higher authority value (and is hence ranked higher in search results). This article (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2370863/6-Crucial-Link-Building-Strategies-to-Drive-Quality-Traffic) gives tips to site-owners on how to get quality traffic to their sites and how to use Google, or any other search engine, effectively. Google’s algorithms are […]
Analyzing Pricing in Smart Grids with Stackelberg Games
Smart Grids, electrical grids which use monitor and act on changes in the network in real time, are becoming an increasingly important area of research as new revolutions in energy technology (more efficient renewables, potential for battery storage, etc.) have become promising ways to address the changes in the ways we consume electricity. The implementation […]
Sequential Decision Making in Group Settings: “May I take your order?”
We’ve recently started talking in class about the influence of networks on individual decisions. For example, we’ve discussed how people tend to “follow the crowd” when making decisions, sometimes even abandoning their own knowledge and blindly trusting in the majority instead. However, while seeing what others in a network have decided can cause your opinion […]
A Matrix View of PageRank
http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc-pagerank This article discusses the methods that are used for Google’s PageRank algorithm for analyzing the value of webpages for search. Because the web has grown to such a massive size of 25 billion pages, search is no trivial task, and calculating values for the rankings of these pages is a daunting task that most […]
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