[Intelligence Seminar] talk of interest: Ramesh Johari, 4/20 12pm, 1001 HBH

[Noah A Smith]

> Ramesh Johari - Assistant Professor at Stanford University, with a full-time
> appointment in the Department of Management Science and Engineering (MS&E),
> will present for the Faculty Research Seminar Series Monday, April 20th,
> 2009, at 12:00 noon in room 1001 HBH at the Heinz College.
>
> Ramesh Johari also has courtesy appointments in the Departments of Computer
> Science (CS) and Electrical Engineering (EE). He is a member of the
> Operations Research group in MS&E, and the Information Systems Laboratory in
> EE. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Stanford Clean Slate
> Internet Program. He received an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard (1998), a
> Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics from Cambridge (1999), and a
> Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (2004).
>
> Title: The interaction of positive externalities and congestion effects in
> services
>
> Abstract:  “We study a system where a service is shared by many identical
> customers; the service is provided by a single resource. As expected each
> customer experiences congestion, a negative externality, from the others'
> usage of the shared resource in our model. In addition, we assume each
> customer experiences a positive externality from others' usage; this is in
> contrast to prior literature that assumes a positive externality that
> depends only on the mere presence of other users. We consider two points of
> view in studying this model: the behavior of self-interested users who
> autonomously form a ``club'', and the behavior of a service manager. We
> first characterize the usage patterns of self-interested users, as well as
> the size of the club that self-interested users would form autonomously. We
> find that this club size is always smaller than that chosen by a service
> manager; however, somewhat surprisingly, usage in the autonomous club is
> always efficient. Next, we carry out an asymptotic analysis in the regime
> where the positive externality is increased without bound. We find that in
> this regime, the asymptotic behavior of the autonomous club can be quite
> different from that formed by a service manager: for example, the autonomous
> club may remain of finite size, even if the club formed by a service manager
> has infinitely many members” - Joint work with Sunil Kumar (Stanford GSB).
>
> Please visit the link below to see his schedule and sign up to meet with
> him:
>
> http://www.cmu.edu/seminars