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Course Timeline (use mouse to drag horizontally)

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Announcements

March 6: Detailed project requirements posted. Suggeted topics have been emailed to students.

March 4: No class on March 7. On March 8 (Tuesday), only one session (Guest Lecture by Prof. Dah Ming Chiu during 4:30-5:15pm). The first group student presentation will be moved to March 14 (Monday).

Feb. 14: HW3 assigned in class. Due before class on Feb. 28 (Monday).

Jan. 29: List of reading announced here. Please email Lingjie your choice of group and selected papers by Feb. 18 (Friday, 5pm). For details, see here.

Jan. 20: Classroom change from Week 3 (Jan. 24): Monday classes will be held in ERG (Engineering Building Phase II) 1009 3:30-5:15pm.

Jan. 20: No class during weeks 4 and 5: Jan. 31 (Monday), Feb. 1 (Tuesday), Feb. 7 (Monday), and Feb. (Tuesday).

Jan 18: HW 2 assigned in class. Due before class on Feb. 14 (Monday).

Jan. 6: First week lecture notes posted.

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Administrative Info

Instructor: Prof. HUANG Jianwei, SHB 717, jwhuang [a] ie.cuhk.edu.hk

Office hour: Tuesday 10:30-11:30 am or by email appointment

Tutor: DUAN Lingjie, dlj008 [a] ie.cuhk.edu.hk

Course web site: http://course.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/~ieg6280

Lecture Time: Monday 3:30-5:10pm (ERG 1009), Tuesday 3:30-5:10pm (SHB 833)

Course Outline: here

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Course Info

Intended audience: graduate students who are interested in using economics to study networks (e.g., communication networks, social networks, transportation networks).

Background: Through this course, you will learn the basics of network economics and selected advanced topics related to the modeling and design of various networking systems (communication networks in particular). Tentative topics include:

• Theory: game theory, auction theory, pricing theory, and mechanism design.
• Applications: Congestion control, internet routing, internet pricing, distributed power control, wireless random MAC, cognitive radio system, DSL spectrum management, P2P systems, ISP interactions.
• Advanced topics (if time allows): network effect, network neutrality, network policy and regulations
  

Prerequisite: a strong desire to learn. Background on communication networking and exposure to optimizations theory are strongly encouraged although not required. The topics will be fun (we are talking about games and money!), but you are expected to work hard.

Course materials: I will post a list of handouts/slides/key papers on the course website. Although no textbooks will be required, the following can be very good readings (and indispensable if you are doing research in this area).

• Game Theory, by D. Fudenberg and J. Tirole, MIT Press, 1991 (classical game theory textbook)
• Game Theory for Applied Economists, by R. Gibbons, Princeton Press, 1992 (a good reading for beginners)
• Games and Information, by E. Rasmusen, Blackwell Publishing, 4th edition, 2007 (good discussions on information related issues)
• Pricing Communication Networks: Economics, Technology and Modeling, by C. Courcoubetis and R. Weber, Wiley, 2003 (good book on network pricing theory)

Acknowledgment: We thank Prof. Asu Ozdaglar from MIT for sharing teaching materials.

Evaluations: Homework (30%), Paper Presentation (20%), Project (50%)

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Lecture and Presentations

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Homework and Solutions

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Paper Reading and Presentation

Reading list: recommended readings can be found here, which contains two parts: the list for in-calss presentation and the list for after-class reading. The division between the two lists are somewhat artitrary; the key consideration is to ensuret that there is a balance list of papers for in-class presentation so we will expereince different topics. The purpose of the lists is to provide a starting point for students to examine existing theory and applications of network economics, and to provide some inspirations of possible course projects. The list is by no means exhausitive; so please feel free to explore deeper based on your research interests.

Presentation: Students need to form groups of 2, and each group will select one paper from the list of "Recommended Papers for In-Class Presentation". Then both students will present the paper in class within a total of 40 mins (incuding Q&A).

• The grade will be based on presentation (15%) and handling of tough questions (5%). You need to handel at least 2 tough questions well in order to get the 5%.
• Google and find tips on how to present a paper. Treat the paper as your own and understand it inside out. 
• What we expect from the presentation
• Provide photos of the authors
• Clear description of the model and key contributions
• Clean summary of the game theoretical models used
• Highlights of the most interesting parts
• Tell us how this paper can be improved
• Do not tell us every detail; do not expect us to remember a list of notations.
• Keep the presentation clean, concise, and to the point.
• Emphasize no more than three take-home messages at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end
• Respect the time limit

Schedule of Presentation:

Group 1: Siduo Shen & Haoran Fang [March 14, 4:25-5:10pm]
S. Adlakha, R. Johari, and A. Goldsmith. "Competition in wireless systems via bayesian interference games." ArXiv preprint arXiv:0709.0516, 2007

Group 2: Deyi Sun & Yichen Yang [March 15: 3:30-4:15pm]
S. R. Bulo and M. Pelillo, “A Game-Theoretic Approach to Hypergraph Clustering,” NIPS 2009.

Group 3: Runhong TANG & Huadong Li [March 15: 4:25-5:10pm]
M. Feldman, K. Lai, I. Stoica, and J. Chuang. "Robust incentive techniques for peer-to-peer networks." In Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Electronic commerce, pages 102–111. ACM, 2004.

Group 4: Yanjiao Chen & Guosen Feng [March 22: 3:30-4:15pm]
J. Jia, Q. Zhang, Q. Zhang, and M. Liu. "Revenue generation for truthful spectrum auction in dynamic spectrum access." In Proceedings of the tenth ACM international symposium on Mobile ad hoc networking and computing, pages 3–12. ACM, 2009.

Group 5: Qianqian Song & Jingjing Wang [March 22: 4:25-5:10pm]
R. Ma, D. Chiu, J. Lui, V. Misra, and D. Rubenstein. “Internet Economics: The use of Shapley value for ISP settlement,” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 18(3):775–787, 2010.

Group 6: Qing Yang & Shang Xia [March 29: 3:30-4:15pm]
T. Roughgarden and E. Tardos. "How bad is selfish routing." Journal of the ACM, 49(2):236–259, 2002.

Group 7: Benyun Shi & Li Tao [March 29: 4:25-5:10pm]
W. Saad, Z. Han, M. Debbah, A. Hjorungnes, and T. Basar. "Coalitional game theory for communication networks." IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 26(5):77–97, 2009.

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Project

There are two types of course projects:

• A comprehensive survey on the application of network economics in a specific domain: wireless networking, energy networks, social networks, etc.
• A research project where you formulate and solve one network economics problem: registered students should have received my suggested topics.

In either case, the minimum requirement is to demonstrate something new, either a new framework of organizing the literature and identifying new research trends/challenges, or a new problem formulation with encouraging preliminary analysis/simulation results. I will be happy to discuss with you on the ideas, especially if you choose one of my suggested project topics. In the past, some successful project eventually leads to high quality conference and journal publications (with extended work after the semester ends).

If you are doing something very closely related to your current PhD research, please inform both your advisor and me. In general, we should avoid this due to fairness considerations.

Here are the project milestones. Please email Lingjie (dlj008[at]ie.cuhk.edu.hk) your reports with the title of “[6280 Project] ...”. All dates are Thursdays unless specified otherwise, and all submissions should be in pdf format.