NetEcon 2016 - 11th Workshop on the Economics of Networks, Systems and Computation

Today's communication networks and networked systems are highly complex and heterogeneous, and are often owned by multiple profit-making entities. For new technologies or infrastructure designs to be adopted, they must not be only based on sound engineering performance considerations but also present the right economic incentives. Recent changes in regulations of the telecommunication industry make such economic considerations even more urgent. For instance, 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 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. NetEcon was established in 2006 (succeeding to the P2PECON, IBC and PINS workshops) and merged with the W-PIN workshop in 2013. We invite submission of extended abstracts describing original research on theoretical/methodological contributions or on applications to cases of interest. It is our hope that NetEcon will serve as a feeder workshop, i.e., that expanded, polished versions of extended abstracts will appear later in major conference proceedings and refereed journals of relevant research communities.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Pricing of resources in communication networks, grids, and cloud computing
Pricing of information goods and services; copyright issues, effect of network externalities (e.g., in social network)
Economic issues in universal broadband access; economics of interconnection and peering
Effects of market structure and regulations (e.g., network neutrality)
Economics of network security and privacy; valuation of personal data
Auctions with applications to networks: spectrum auctions, auction-based marketplaces for network and cloud resources
Incentive mechanisms for networks: peer-to-peer systems, clouds, wireless networks, spam prevention, security
Methods for engineering incentives and disincentives (e.g., reputation, trust, control, accountability, anonymity)
Empirical studies of strategic behavior (or the lack thereof) in existing, deployed systems
Design of incentive-aware network architectures and protocols
Game-theoretic models and techniques for network economics: large games, learning, mechanism design, interaction of game theory and information theory or queuing theory, information exchange, diffusion, dynamics of cooperation and network formation, trades in social and economic networks
Algorithmic mechanism design for network systems
Critiques of existing models and solution concepts, as well as proposals of better models and solution concepts
Studies of open collaboration, peer production, crowdsourcing, and human computation.
Submissions must be in the form of extended abstracts of at most 4 pages (including all figures, tables, references, etc.) containing all important results to allow the reader to evaluate the novelty and magnitude of the contribution. In case 4 pages is not sufficient to provide enough information (e.g., proofs) to allow the reader to make a knowledgeable evaluation of the paper's claims, we encourage the authors to provide supplementary material either as clearly marked appendix (without page limit) or by including a link to the full version of their extended abstract. Such supplementary material, however, will be read at the discretion of the PC members and will not appear in the proceedings in case of acceptance.
Accepted extended abstracts will be published in a special issue of ACM Performance Evaluation Review (PER) and will be available online through ACM portal digital library. Authors of accepted abstracts grant ACM permission to publish them in print and digital formats.
Note that authors retain the copyright of their work published in ACM PER, with freedom to submit it elsewhere. Yet, authors for whom publication of a 4 pages extended abstract in the NetEcon proceedings would preclude later publication of an expanded version in the relevant venue may elect to contribute only a one-page abstract of their submitted extended abstract to the NetEcon proceedings. Such an abstract should include the URL of a working paper or preprint that contains the main results presented at the NetEcon workshop. Authors will make this decision after receiving a notice of acceptance.