[Colloq] Hiring talk **FRIDAY, February 14, 2003** 149CN

[Rachel Bates]

College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

presents
Manoj Parameswaran
University of Maryland

  who will speak on:
Economics of Production and Distribution of Digital Products

Friday, February 14, 2003
10:30am
149 Cullinane Hall
Northeastern University



ABSTRACT
Communication networks and information technologies are increasingly
recognized as having a significant economic impact; disrupting traditional
market structures, introducing new business models, and generating new
digital products and services. Research into these driving technologies
stand to gain by theories and tools of business and economics used in
conjunction with those of engineering. My talk will outline various streams
of research that seek to use economic theory and management science in
coming up with business models that allow for and utilize the idiosyncrasies
of underlying technological systems. In particular, I focus on the
production and distribution of digital products through data networks,
addressing the incentive problems and resource allocation issues in the
presence of multiple economic agents owning the content and different parts
of the digital supply chain. When service quality is critical, it is
necessary to have pricing mechanisms and contracts that provide the right
incentives for the content and network providers and the consumers to
participate, supplementing the technological protocols that ensure QoS. In
the case of end to end service quality for unicast multimedia flows, double
auction markets that can be deployed in conjunction with a diffserv protocol
are designed to allocate capacities in bundles, and are supplemented by
inter domain contracts that serve as interconnection agreements to sustain
capacity allocations across privately owned networks. In the case of a
multicast distribution model, prices for node capacities and for content
together with consumer valuations feed into an auction that determines the
distribution graph for any particular ‘product’. The auction problem turns
out to be a Steiner tree problem. The model is extended by having broadband
access providers act as intermediaries packaging multimedia content and
reselling it, which can partially alleviate the public goods problem by
product differentiation.

Host:  Carole Hafner