Improving the Electricity Market with VCG
In “An Incentive-Compatible Energy Pricing Mechanism for Electricity-Gas Interconnected System Using Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Mechanism Design Theory,” Guo et al. discuss the potential of applying VCG to the electricity market as its current system (locational marginal pricing or LMP) of finding market-clearing prices does not incentivize truthful bidding as would be the case under VCG. The paper […]
Why people aren’t getting vaccinated: Bayes’ Rule misinformation
There have been many significant events that have taken place the past few years with regards to COVID-19. There was the emergence of the disease in the US in the spring of 2020, starting winter of 2021 when the first US residents started getting vaccinated, and the development of the delta variant in the US […]
Information Cascades and their Effect on Covid-19 Misinformation
An information cascade results from the strong influence of people upon each other. Although some have helpful, private information, there is an extent that is reached at which this information will be disregarded in order to “follow the crowd.” This standard holds true on social media, a recent example being the spread of misinformation about […]
Using Network Analysis to Explore How Social Movements Emerge on Twitter: A Case Study of Occupy Wall Street
As computerization becomes the zeitgeist of contemporary society, individual behaviors on social media have more echoes than ever before. This creates a strong potential for anything happening online to be amplified, and the following consequences include many that would have a huge influence on society, for example, social movements. At the core of the spread […]
Using Matching Markets to Fight Climate Warming
With all eyes focused on the Glasgow COP26 climate conference this week, it seems only appropriate to register a blog entry on how mathematical tools might help in the fight against climate warming. Global warming is our generation’s greatest challenge and all tools must be harnessed to limit the planet’s future warming. Market-based solutions such […]
Bayes Rule, Yelp Reviews, and Customer Satisfaction
Unfortunately, what we see or are told is not always what we get. While this applies to many aspects of life, I have found this to be especially true when I order food from restaurants. When I am somewhere where I do not have experience with the restaurant options, I have no option but to […]
PageRank and resistance
In class, we have discussed the PageRank algorithm for assigning importance values to nodes in a graph through the hub-and-authority model. However, it is also possible to formulate the algorithm in terms of a random walk as follows: for a given vertex, the random walker will move to a neighboring vertex with probability alpha, or […]
Pagerank’s discrimination
PageRank (PR) is a mathematical formula that judges the “value of a page” by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it. Its purpose is to determine the relative importance of a given webpage in a network (i.e., the World Wide Web). As we read in chapter 14, specifically how […]