2005 9th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, 2005. IM 2005.
This paper studies pricing mechanisms for short-term contracts for network services in a recurrin... more This paper studies pricing mechanisms for short-term contracts for network services in a recurring auction with sealed bids. We propose and evaluate a novel winner selection policy in such an auction. The new approach was motivated by an observation that in a recurring auction enough customers must be willing to participate in future auction rounds to prevent collapse of prices. Using simulations, we compare the proposed mechanism with traditional ones. The results demonstrate that the new method (i) increases revenues of the network service provider, (ii) minimizes loss of fairness, and (iii) enlarges the active customer base of a recurring auction.
Increasing role of services in developed economies around the world combined with ubiquitous pres... more Increasing role of services in developed economies around the world combined with ubiquitous presence of computer networks and information technologies result in rapid growth of e-services. Markets for e-services often require flexible pricing to be efficient and therefore frequently use auctions to satisfy this requirement. However, auctions in e-service markets are recurring since typically e-services are offered repeatedly, each time for a specific time interval. Additionally, all e-services offered in an auction round must be sold to avoid resource waste. Finally, enough bidders must be willing to participate in future auction rounds to prevent a collapse of market prices. Because of these requirements, previously designed auctions cannot work efficiently in e-service markets. In this chapter, we introduce and evaluate a novel auction, called Optimal Recurring Auction (ORA), for e-services markets. We present also simulation results that show that, unlike the traditional auctions, ORA stabilizes the market prices and maximizes the auctioneer's revenue in e-service markets.
Seventh IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology (CEC'05)
Many e-services are time-sensitive as the users request them for a specific time period. Such ser... more Many e-services are time-sensitive as the users request them for a specific time period. Such services need to be repeatedly offered to keep them constantly utilized. This paper studies winner selection strategies in a recurring auction for such time-sensitive e-services. We observe that because of uneven wealth distribution, the least wealthy bidders tend to drop out of recurring auction as they persistently loose. The bidders dropping out of an auction decrease competition and can cause a collapse of winning prices. We propose and evaluate a novel auction mechanism that enables bidder drop control. Compared to traditional auction mechanisms, ours increases revenue of the e-service provider and decreases loss of fairness of the e-service allocation.
2010 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), 2010
This paper studies economic models of user participation incentive in participatory sensing appli... more This paper studies economic models of user participation incentive in participatory sensing applications. User participation is the most important element in participatory sensing applications for providing adequate level of service quality. However, incentive mechanism and its economic model for user participation have never been addressed so far in this research domain. In order to stimulate user participation, we design and evaluate a novel Reverse Auction based Dynamic Price (RADP) incentive mechanism, where users can sell their sensing data to a service provider with users' claimed bid prices. The proposed incentive mechanism focuses on minimizing and stabilizing incentive cost while maintaining adequate number of participants by preventing users from dropping out of participatory sensing applications. Compared with a Random Selection with Fixed Price (RSFP) incentive mechanism, the proposed mechanism not only reduces the incentive cost for retaining same number of participants by more than 60% but also improves the fairness of incentive distribution and social welfare. More importantly, RADP can remove burden of accurate pricing for user sensing data, the most difficult step in RSFP.
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems - GIS '11, 2011
Resolving geo-identities of addresses in emerging economies 1 where users rely primarily on short... more Resolving geo-identities of addresses in emerging economies 1 where users rely primarily on short messaging as the means of querying, poses several daunting challenges: lack of proper addressing schemes, non-availability of cartographic information and non-standardized nomenclature of geo-spatial entities such as streets and avenues, to name a few. In this work, we propose a simple and elegant approach to solve this problem for emerging economies. By treating address texts as short documents and exploiting latent proximity information contained in them-for example, landmark like references, similarity of address texts etc-we transform the problem of resolving geo-identity to a search problem on short annotated geo-spatial documents, collected through extensive survey of six cities in India. Our solution spans all the phases of building a geo-identity resolution system, even though our emphasis is on the collection and organization of the corpus to facilitate a search engine backend for the task. Through experimentation based on a representative test set collected from the real world, we demonstrate how this approach achieves over 94% accuracy in resolution and an order of magnitude reduction in system state (memory) with nearly zero false-negatives-a significant improvement over the state of the art in emerging markets.
2010 7th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, 2010
ABSTRACT Efficiently maintaining and managing personal relationships have become imperative in ou... more ABSTRACT Efficiently maintaining and managing personal relationships have become imperative in our personal and professional lives. In this paper we describe the design of a mobile personal relationship manager (PRM), a prototype implementation on Nokia S60 smartphones, and results from initial user studies. The PRM system automatically extracts and manages contacts and their network from user's various communication activities, and provides various functions for managing personal communications efficiently. Our contributions are to make it easy to enable the users to manage personal relationships and communications, and the user studies that validate the design of our prototype.
User participation is one of the most important elements in participatory sensing application for... more User participation is one of the most important elements in participatory sensing application for providing adequate level of service quality. However, incentive mechanism and its economic model for user participation have been less addressed so far in this research domain. This paper studies the economic model of user participation incentive in participatory sensing applications. To stimulate user participation, we design and evaluate a novel reverse auction based dynamic pricing incentive mechanism where users can sell their sensing data to a service provider with users' claimed bid prices. The proposed incentive mechanism focuses on minimizing and stabilizing the incentive cost while maintaining adequate level of participants by preventing users from dropping out of participatory sensing applications. Compared with random selection based fixed pricing incentive mechanism, the proposed mechanism not only reduces the incentive cost for retaining the same number of participants but also improves the fairness of incentive distribution and social welfare. It also helps us to achieve the geographically balanced sensing measurements and, more importantly, can remove the burden of accurate price decision for user data that is the most difficult step in designing incentive mechanism.
This paper studies pricing mechanisms for short-term contracts for network services in a recurrin... more This paper studies pricing mechanisms for short-term contracts for network services in a recurring auction with sealed bids. We propose and evaluate a novel winner selection policy in such an auction. The new approach was motivated by an observation that in a recurring auction enough customers must be willing to participate in future auction rounds to prevent the collapse of prices. Using a simulation, we compare the proposed mechanism with traditional ones. The results demonstrate that the new method increases ...
In this paper, we discuss how advertisers, by considering minimum return on investment (ROI), cha... more In this paper, we discuss how advertisers, by considering minimum return on investment (ROI), change their bidding and, consequently the auctioneer’s revenue in sponsored search advertisement auctions. We analyze the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG), Generalized Second Price (GSP) and Generalized First Price (GFP) auction mechanisms in that respect. Analytical results are presented for the dominant strategy bidding prices in the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction and the ex-post equilibrium locally-envy free prices in the Generalized Second Price auction. The simulation results are presented for all three mechanisms: VCG, GSP, and GFP auctions. We conclude that the impact of considering ROI during bidding varies among different auction mechanisms, changing the traditional assessment of their merits for sponsored search advertisement. Keywords Sponsored search advertisement auction, return on investment, auction mechanism, locally-envy free price, incentive compatible auction. 1.
Parking in crowded urban areas is a precious resource that im-pacts driver stress levels, daily p... more Parking in crowded urban areas is a precious resource that im-pacts driver stress levels, daily productivity, and the environ-ment. A reservation system that enables individuals to buy park-ing spots prior to leaving their home would significantly ease these concerns. However, designing an infrastructure for guaran-teed parking requires extensive sensor deployment and manpower, which is expensive and time-consuming proposition. In this paper, we present CrowdPark, a crowdsourcing platform that enables users to "loosely reserve" parking spots. Unlike tra-ditional reservation platforms where sellers are usually the owners of resources, CrowdPark achieves parking reservation by crowd-sourcing information about when parking resources will be avail-able, and using this availability information to help other users find parking spots. The design of such a crowdsourcing-based parking reservation system presents several challenges including incentive design, robustness to malicious...
GLOBECOM 2009 - 2009 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2009
Abstract This paper studies an auction based allocation of network resources for short-term contr... more Abstract This paper studies an auction based allocation of network resources for short-term contracts for heterogeneous network services. The combinatorial winner selection yields the optimal resources allocation in a single-round auction for heterogeneous resources. However, the recurring nature of auction for network services causes least wealthy bidders to exit the auction as they persistently lose under the traditional combinatorial winner selection that focuses only on revenue maximization. Such exits decrease price ...
... Center 955 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA *E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: ... more ... Center 955 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA *E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: umesh.1.chandra ... considerable attention in various filed of ubiquitous and mobile computing applications and services [2]. One of widely proposed context aware applications ...
ABSTRACT The shortage of parking in crowded urban areas causes severe societal problems such as t... more ABSTRACT The shortage of parking in crowded urban areas causes severe societal problems such as traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and many others. Recently, crowdsourced parking, where smartphone users are exploited to collect realtime parking availability information, has attracted significant attention. However, existing crowdsourced parking information systems suffer from low user participation rate and data quality due to the lack of carefully designed incentive schemes. In this paper, we address the incentive problem of trustworthy crowdsourced parking information systems by presenting an incentive platform named TruCentive, where high utility parking data can be obtained from unreliable crowds of mobile users. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we provide hierarchical incentives to stimulate the participation of mobile users for contributing parking information. Second, by introducing utility-related incentives, our platform encourages participants to contribute high utility data and thereby enhances the quality of collected data. Third, our active confirmation scheme validates the parking information utility by game-theoretically formulated incentive protocols. The active confirming not only validates the utility of contributed data but re-sells the high utility data as well. Our evaluation through user study on Amazon Mechanical Turk and simulation study demonstrate the feasibility and stability of TruCentive incentive platform.
2005 9th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, 2005. IM 2005.
This paper studies pricing mechanisms for short-term contracts for network services in a recurrin... more This paper studies pricing mechanisms for short-term contracts for network services in a recurring auction with sealed bids. We propose and evaluate a novel winner selection policy in such an auction. The new approach was motivated by an observation that in a recurring auction enough customers must be willing to participate in future auction rounds to prevent collapse of prices. Using simulations, we compare the proposed mechanism with traditional ones. The results demonstrate that the new method (i) increases revenues of the network service provider, (ii) minimizes loss of fairness, and (iii) enlarges the active customer base of a recurring auction.
Increasing role of services in developed economies around the world combined with ubiquitous pres... more Increasing role of services in developed economies around the world combined with ubiquitous presence of computer networks and information technologies result in rapid growth of e-services. Markets for e-services often require flexible pricing to be efficient and therefore frequently use auctions to satisfy this requirement. However, auctions in e-service markets are recurring since typically e-services are offered repeatedly, each time for a specific time interval. Additionally, all e-services offered in an auction round must be sold to avoid resource waste. Finally, enough bidders must be willing to participate in future auction rounds to prevent a collapse of market prices. Because of these requirements, previously designed auctions cannot work efficiently in e-service markets. In this chapter, we introduce and evaluate a novel auction, called Optimal Recurring Auction (ORA), for e-services markets. We present also simulation results that show that, unlike the traditional auctions, ORA stabilizes the market prices and maximizes the auctioneer's revenue in e-service markets.
Seventh IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology (CEC'05)
Many e-services are time-sensitive as the users request them for a specific time period. Such ser... more Many e-services are time-sensitive as the users request them for a specific time period. Such services need to be repeatedly offered to keep them constantly utilized. This paper studies winner selection strategies in a recurring auction for such time-sensitive e-services. We observe that because of uneven wealth distribution, the least wealthy bidders tend to drop out of recurring auction as they persistently loose. The bidders dropping out of an auction decrease competition and can cause a collapse of winning prices. We propose and evaluate a novel auction mechanism that enables bidder drop control. Compared to traditional auction mechanisms, ours increases revenue of the e-service provider and decreases loss of fairness of the e-service allocation.
2010 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), 2010
This paper studies economic models of user participation incentive in participatory sensing appli... more This paper studies economic models of user participation incentive in participatory sensing applications. User participation is the most important element in participatory sensing applications for providing adequate level of service quality. However, incentive mechanism and its economic model for user participation have never been addressed so far in this research domain. In order to stimulate user participation, we design and evaluate a novel Reverse Auction based Dynamic Price (RADP) incentive mechanism, where users can sell their sensing data to a service provider with users' claimed bid prices. The proposed incentive mechanism focuses on minimizing and stabilizing incentive cost while maintaining adequate number of participants by preventing users from dropping out of participatory sensing applications. Compared with a Random Selection with Fixed Price (RSFP) incentive mechanism, the proposed mechanism not only reduces the incentive cost for retaining same number of participants by more than 60% but also improves the fairness of incentive distribution and social welfare. More importantly, RADP can remove burden of accurate pricing for user sensing data, the most difficult step in RSFP.
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems - GIS '11, 2011
Resolving geo-identities of addresses in emerging economies 1 where users rely primarily on short... more Resolving geo-identities of addresses in emerging economies 1 where users rely primarily on short messaging as the means of querying, poses several daunting challenges: lack of proper addressing schemes, non-availability of cartographic information and non-standardized nomenclature of geo-spatial entities such as streets and avenues, to name a few. In this work, we propose a simple and elegant approach to solve this problem for emerging economies. By treating address texts as short documents and exploiting latent proximity information contained in them-for example, landmark like references, similarity of address texts etc-we transform the problem of resolving geo-identity to a search problem on short annotated geo-spatial documents, collected through extensive survey of six cities in India. Our solution spans all the phases of building a geo-identity resolution system, even though our emphasis is on the collection and organization of the corpus to facilitate a search engine backend for the task. Through experimentation based on a representative test set collected from the real world, we demonstrate how this approach achieves over 94% accuracy in resolution and an order of magnitude reduction in system state (memory) with nearly zero false-negatives-a significant improvement over the state of the art in emerging markets.
2010 7th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, 2010
ABSTRACT Efficiently maintaining and managing personal relationships have become imperative in ou... more ABSTRACT Efficiently maintaining and managing personal relationships have become imperative in our personal and professional lives. In this paper we describe the design of a mobile personal relationship manager (PRM), a prototype implementation on Nokia S60 smartphones, and results from initial user studies. The PRM system automatically extracts and manages contacts and their network from user's various communication activities, and provides various functions for managing personal communications efficiently. Our contributions are to make it easy to enable the users to manage personal relationships and communications, and the user studies that validate the design of our prototype.
User participation is one of the most important elements in participatory sensing application for... more User participation is one of the most important elements in participatory sensing application for providing adequate level of service quality. However, incentive mechanism and its economic model for user participation have been less addressed so far in this research domain. This paper studies the economic model of user participation incentive in participatory sensing applications. To stimulate user participation, we design and evaluate a novel reverse auction based dynamic pricing incentive mechanism where users can sell their sensing data to a service provider with users' claimed bid prices. The proposed incentive mechanism focuses on minimizing and stabilizing the incentive cost while maintaining adequate level of participants by preventing users from dropping out of participatory sensing applications. Compared with random selection based fixed pricing incentive mechanism, the proposed mechanism not only reduces the incentive cost for retaining the same number of participants but also improves the fairness of incentive distribution and social welfare. It also helps us to achieve the geographically balanced sensing measurements and, more importantly, can remove the burden of accurate price decision for user data that is the most difficult step in designing incentive mechanism.
This paper studies pricing mechanisms for short-term contracts for network services in a recurrin... more This paper studies pricing mechanisms for short-term contracts for network services in a recurring auction with sealed bids. We propose and evaluate a novel winner selection policy in such an auction. The new approach was motivated by an observation that in a recurring auction enough customers must be willing to participate in future auction rounds to prevent the collapse of prices. Using a simulation, we compare the proposed mechanism with traditional ones. The results demonstrate that the new method increases ...
In this paper, we discuss how advertisers, by considering minimum return on investment (ROI), cha... more In this paper, we discuss how advertisers, by considering minimum return on investment (ROI), change their bidding and, consequently the auctioneer’s revenue in sponsored search advertisement auctions. We analyze the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG), Generalized Second Price (GSP) and Generalized First Price (GFP) auction mechanisms in that respect. Analytical results are presented for the dominant strategy bidding prices in the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction and the ex-post equilibrium locally-envy free prices in the Generalized Second Price auction. The simulation results are presented for all three mechanisms: VCG, GSP, and GFP auctions. We conclude that the impact of considering ROI during bidding varies among different auction mechanisms, changing the traditional assessment of their merits for sponsored search advertisement. Keywords Sponsored search advertisement auction, return on investment, auction mechanism, locally-envy free price, incentive compatible auction. 1.
Parking in crowded urban areas is a precious resource that im-pacts driver stress levels, daily p... more Parking in crowded urban areas is a precious resource that im-pacts driver stress levels, daily productivity, and the environ-ment. A reservation system that enables individuals to buy park-ing spots prior to leaving their home would significantly ease these concerns. However, designing an infrastructure for guaran-teed parking requires extensive sensor deployment and manpower, which is expensive and time-consuming proposition. In this paper, we present CrowdPark, a crowdsourcing platform that enables users to "loosely reserve" parking spots. Unlike tra-ditional reservation platforms where sellers are usually the owners of resources, CrowdPark achieves parking reservation by crowd-sourcing information about when parking resources will be avail-able, and using this availability information to help other users find parking spots. The design of such a crowdsourcing-based parking reservation system presents several challenges including incentive design, robustness to malicious...
GLOBECOM 2009 - 2009 IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2009
Abstract This paper studies an auction based allocation of network resources for short-term contr... more Abstract This paper studies an auction based allocation of network resources for short-term contracts for heterogeneous network services. The combinatorial winner selection yields the optimal resources allocation in a single-round auction for heterogeneous resources. However, the recurring nature of auction for network services causes least wealthy bidders to exit the auction as they persistently lose under the traditional combinatorial winner selection that focuses only on revenue maximization. Such exits decrease price ...
... Center 955 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA *E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: ... more ... Center 955 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304 USA *E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: umesh.1.chandra ... considerable attention in various filed of ubiquitous and mobile computing applications and services [2]. One of widely proposed context aware applications ...
ABSTRACT The shortage of parking in crowded urban areas causes severe societal problems such as t... more ABSTRACT The shortage of parking in crowded urban areas causes severe societal problems such as traffic congestion, environmental pollution, and many others. Recently, crowdsourced parking, where smartphone users are exploited to collect realtime parking availability information, has attracted significant attention. However, existing crowdsourced parking information systems suffer from low user participation rate and data quality due to the lack of carefully designed incentive schemes. In this paper, we address the incentive problem of trustworthy crowdsourced parking information systems by presenting an incentive platform named TruCentive, where high utility parking data can be obtained from unreliable crowds of mobile users. Our contribution is three-fold. First, we provide hierarchical incentives to stimulate the participation of mobile users for contributing parking information. Second, by introducing utility-related incentives, our platform encourages participants to contribute high utility data and thereby enhances the quality of collected data. Third, our active confirmation scheme validates the parking information utility by game-theoretically formulated incentive protocols. The active confirming not only validates the utility of contributed data but re-sells the high utility data as well. Our evaluation through user study on Amazon Mechanical Turk and simulation study demonstrate the feasibility and stability of TruCentive incentive platform.
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Papers by Juong-Sik Lee