Showing papers by "Dengji Zhao published in 2018"

Selling Multiple Items via Social Networks

Abstract: We consider a market where a seller sells multiple units of a commodity in a social network. Each node/buyer in the social network can only directly communicate with her neighbours, i.e. the seller can only sell the commodity to her neighbours if she could not find a way to inform other buyers. In this paper, we design a novel promotion mechanism that incentivizes all buyers, who are aware of the sale, to invite all their neighbours to join the sale, even though there is no guarantee that their efforts will be paid. While traditional sale promotions such as sponsored search auctions cannot guarantee a positive return for the advertiser (the seller), our mechanism guarantees that the seller's revenue is better than not using the advertising. More importantly, the seller does not need to pay if the advertising is not beneficial to her.

Customer Sharing in Economic Networks with Costs

Abstract: In an economic market, sellers, infomediaries and customers constitute an economic network. Each seller has her own customer group and the seller's private customers are unobservable to other sellers. Therefore, a seller can only sell commodities among her own customers unless other sellers or infomediaries share her sale information to their customer groups. However, a seller is not incentivized to share others' sale information by default, which leads to inefficient resource allocation and limited revenue for the sale. To tackle this problem, we develop a novel mechanism called customer sharing mechanism (CSM) which incentivizes all sellers to share each other's sale information to their private customer groups. Furthermore, CSM also incentivizes all customers to truthfully participate in the sale. In the end, CSM not only allocates the commodities efficiently but also optimizes the seller's revenue.

Customer Sharing in Economic Networks with Costs

Abstract: In an economic market, sellers, infomediaries and customers constitute an economic network. Each seller has her own customer group and the seller's private customers are unobservable to other sellers. Therefore, a seller can only sell commodities among her own customers unless other sellers or infomediaries share her sale information to their customer groups. However, a seller is not incentivized to share others' sale information by default, which leads to inefficient resource allocation and limited revenue for the sale. To tackle this problem, we develop a novel mechanism called customer sharing mechanism (CSM) which incentivizes all sellers to share each other's sale information to their private customer groups. Furthermore, CSM also incentivizes all customers to truthfully participate in the sale. In the end, CSM not only allocates the commodities efficiently but also optimizes the seller's revenue.

SMART Infrastructure: Benefits and Pitfalls

Abstract: Please include a 300-400 word abstract

Simulations vs. human playing in repeated prisoner?s dilemma

Abstract: The repeated prisoner’s dilemma is an essential game model which is widely applied in real-world economic situations such as price competition between similar products. Studies of the game have focused on the equilibrium strategies for rational players in simplified settings, which do not necessarily reflect the complexity of real-world applications. Therefore, this paper proposes an advanced model that mimics the real-world dynamics of the game, and uses both simulations and human-playing to study the robustness and applicability of different strategies in the game. The result indeed discovers certain weaknesses of the classical strategies. It further shows that well-known dominant strategies such as tit-for-tat are rarely played by human players (less than \(5\%\) of the participants played dominant strategies) and instead they tend to use more involved strategies, which again demonstrates their bounded rationality. Our model also plays a crucial role in analyzing real-world multi-agent systems involving human players.

Customer Sharing in Economic Networks with Costs

Abstract: In an economic market, sellers, infomediaries and customers constitute an economic network. Each seller has her own customer group and the seller's private customers are unobservable to other sellers. Therefore, a seller can only sell commodities among her own customers unless other sellers or infomediaries share her sale information to their customer groups. However, a seller is not incentivized to share others' sale information by default, which leads to inefficient resource allocation and limited revenue for the sale. To tackle this problem, we develop a novel mechanism called customer sharing mechanism (CSM) which incentivizes all sellers to share each other's sale information to their private customer groups. Furthermore, CSM also incentivizes all customers to truthfully participate in the sale. In the end, CSM not only allocates the commodities efficiently but also optimizes the seller's revenue.