Networked Markets, MS&E 233

• Staff, office hours, and contact information
  
• Syllabus
  
• Timeline
• Projects
• Handouts
• Homeworks

STAFF

SYLLABUS (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

Topic	Lectures	Details
Introduction	1	Illustrative Examples: Groupon + eBay + craigslist + Ashley Madison + oDesk + rhapsody + netflix + Mechanical Turk. Technical example: Heavy Tails
Auctions	4	The Vickery auction and eBay; Extensions to Sponsored Search (i.e. search advertising); Pricing models for selling ads on the Internet; Reserve Prices in auctions; Designing markets for economic efficiency and budgets; Additional examples of businesses built on search or search advertising
Reputation Systems and Collaborative Filtering	3	PageRank; Reputation Systems based on Incentives and Penalties (eg. eBay's reputation system); Collaborative Filtering; Applications to advertising and retail
Tracking on the Internet, Personalization and Privacy	2-3	Anecdotes; database definitions; differential privacy; industry standards; cookies; browser tracking; benefits of user specific signals.
Midterm	1	70 minutes; In-class
Long tails and networked models	2	Deeper understanding of heavy tails, including connections to networked models; virality and social marketing; network models
Advanced topics in reputations and markets	2	Credit networks and virtual currencies; bitCoin; peer-to-peer file sharing; prediction markets
Advanced topics in networked pricing	2	Experimental frameworks; pricing; ad exchanges
Project presentations	2	Attendance mandatory

TIMELINE

PROJECTS

Please form a group and submit your project preferences by April 11th. Some project ideas are given below. We will add more, if needed. Also, feel free to suggest a different project. We will soon start a mechanism to help students find each other. When you submit your project preferences, we will ask you to submit a ranked list of two projects, and also a ranked list of the main interests of each group (eg. mathematics, economics, business insights, algorithms, software development, data analysis, case studies, advertising, retail).

A midterm report for each project will be due on May 13th. This should be at most four pages, and briefly outline your broad approach, your current progress, future plans, and any questions you have for the instructors. We will schedule 15 minute meetings with each group to discuss the midterm report. The final reports will be due on May 28th, and should be at most 15 pages in length. In addition, each group will be asked to present a 10 minute overview of their project.

1. Run a campaign for five weeks for a charity or local business of your choice using Google and one out of Facebook or Twitter. We will provide advertising coupons. We will balance teams between FB and Twitter, and at most eight teams are allowed to pick this project. You will be expected to provide insights into how social and search advertising differ.


2. Design (but do not implement) an incentive scheme for users of the EteRNA project, and discuss its pros and cons. Use pre-existing data to identify good designers and good predictors, and use that to see if you can improve the selection process for the experiments that are actually conducted. Professor Rhiju Das from the BioChemistry department is available for a brief consultation session and for providing access to data. Two scenarios of interest are:
   (A) suppose there are 10,000 participants, and there are only 8 designs synthesized per week. This was the case for eterna in 2011-2012, and will likely hold for any new citizen science projects that follow EteRNA's template.
   (B) suppose there are 10,000 participants, and there are 2,000 designs synthesized per week (this is the current case).


3. BitTorrent is a Peer-to-peer network for data exchange. BitCoin is a new cryptographic currency. Design (but do not implement) a protocol that uses BitCoin as a virtual currency to make sure that users of BitTorrent are appropriately and fairly incentivized to upload file-blocks. Address as many systems and incentives issues as you can think of, so the output of your project is something that a developer can code. Adam d'Angelo, the CEO of Quora, who conceived of the project, will be available for a brief consulting session. At most two teams are allowed to pick this project.


4. Help design and run a user trial (in class) for consensus building using widescope. Developers of widescope (http://widescope.stanford.edu) will be available for consulting. At most two teams are allowed to pick this project.

HANDOUTS

HOMEWORKS