The Joint Workshop on Pricing and Incentives in Networks and Systems (WPIN+NetEcon 2014)

Abstract

Today’s communication networks and networked systems are highly complex and heterogeneous, and often owned by multiple profit-making entities. For new technologies or infrastructure designs to be adopted, they must not only be based on sound engineering performance considerations but also present the right economic incentives. Recent changes in regulations of the telecommunications industry make such economic considerations even more urgent. For instance, new concerns such as network neutrality have a significant impact on the evolution of communication networks. At the same time, communication networks and networked systems support increasing economic activity based on applications and services such as cloud computing, social networks, and peer-to-peer networks. These applications pose new challenges such as the development of good pricing and incentive mechanisms to promote effective system-wide behavior. In relation to these applications, security and privacy also require consideration of economic aspects to be fully understood. The aim of W-PIN+NetEcon is to foster discussions on the application of economic and game-theoretic models and principles to address challenges in the development of networks and network-based applications and services. WPIN+NetEcon was formed as a merger of the successful NetEcon (earlier P2PECON, IBC and PINS) and W-PIN workshops. We received 39 submissions, each reviewed by three members of the program committee. Based on the reviews, we selected 12 papers and 7 posters. The papers presentations were organized into four sessions: “Security games,” “Pricing and neutrality,” “Learning and coordination,” and “Content, auctions and advertisement” and the posters were presented in a separate poster session. In the “Security games” session, Smith et al. propose a new solution concept for multi-defender security games. They use it to analyze a model of security game on networks and find that defenders tend to over-defend even with positive externalities. Laszka and Gueye analyze network blocking games under budget constraints. They show that the equilibrium computation is NP-hard with a maximumcost constraint, whereas it can be solved efficiently with an expected-cost constraint. Dritsoula and Musacchio propose a model of ad networks competing for publishers by selecting their revenue sharing rate and their aggressiveness in fighting click-spam. They show that, at equilibrium, ad networks are fighting click-spam aggressively and compete mostly in