Related papers: Transparency and Control in Platforms for Networke…
Recent research in industrial organisation has investigated the essential place that middlemen have in the networks that make up our global economy. In this paper we attempt to understand how such middlemen compete with each other through a…
A key issue in the control of distributed discrete systems modeled as Markov decisions processes, is that often the state of the system is not directly observable at any single location in the system. The participants in the control scheme…
Congestion control algorithms (CCAs) operate in partially observable environments, lacking direct visibility into link capacities, or competing flows. To ensure fair sharing of network resources, CCAs communicate their fair share through…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
Digital collaborative platforms have become crucial venues of career advancement and individual success in many creative fields, from engineering to the arts. Indirect gender discrimination is a key component to gendered disadvantage on…
Online platforms often have conflicting goals: they face tradeoffs between increasing efficiency and reducing disparities, where the latter may relate to objectives such as the longer-term health of the marketplace or the organization's…
We study the problem of controlling the interference created to an external observer by a communication processes. We model the interference in terms of its type (empirical distribution), and we analyze the consequences of placing…
The increasing presence of decentralized renewable generation in the power grid has motivated consumers to install batteries to save excess energy for future use. The high price of energy storage calls for a shared storage system, but…
In distributed predictive control structures, communication among agents is required to achieve a consensus and approach an optimal global behavior. Such negotiation mechanisms are sensitive to attacks on these exchanges. This paper…
This paper proposes a stylized, dynamic model to address the issue of sorting online. There are two large homogeneous groups of individuals. Everyone must choose between two online platforms, one of which has superior amenities (akin to…
Access control needs have broad design implications, but access control specifications may be elicited before, during, or after these needs are captured. Because access control knowledge is distributed, we need to make knowledge asymmetries…
Calls for heightened consideration of fairness and accountability in algorithmically-informed public decisions---like taxation, justice, and child protection---are now commonplace. How might designers support such human values? We…
We propose that future AI transparency and accountability regulations are based on an open global standard for exchanging information about AI systems, which allows co-existence of potentially conflicting local regulations. Then, we discuss…
This paper considers the distributed robust suboptimal consensus control problem of linear multi-agent systems, with both H2 and H_infty performance requirements. A novel two-step complementary design approach is proposed. In the first…
We analyze digital markets where a monopolist platform uses data to match multiproduct sellers with heterogeneous consumers who can purchase both on and off the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their…
There is a growing debate on whether the future of feedback control systems will be dominated by data-driven or model-driven approaches. Each of these two approaches has their own complimentary set of advantages and disadvantages, however,…
We study the problem of designing a two-sided market (double auction) to maximize the gains from trade (social welfare) under the constraints of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatibility and budget-balance. Our goal is to do so for an…
The design of optimal disturbance accommodation and servomechanism controllers with limited plant model information is considered in this paper. Their closed-loop performance are compared using a performance metric called competitive ratio…
This paper studies how platform design shapes strategic behavior in decentralized electricity trading. We develop a finite-horizon dynamic game in which photovoltaic- and battery-equipped players ("prosumers") trade on a platform that maps…
Environments for decentralized on-line collaboration are now widespread on the Web, underpinning open-source efforts, knowledge creation sites including Wikipedia, and other experiments in joint production. When a distributed group works…