My area of interest is at the intersection of Computer Science, Economics, and Social Science. My current research focuses on understanding the dynamics of strategic network formation in sharing economy.
Work-in-Progress
Peer-to-Peer Network: Kantian Cooperation Discourage Free Riding (with Snehal Ratnaparkhi and B. B. Gupta)
The problem of how to achieve cooperation among rational peers in order to discourage free riding is one that has received a lot of attention in peer-to-peer computing and is still an important one. The field of game theory is applied to the task of finding solutions that will encourage cooperation while discouraging free riding. The cooperative conduct of peers is typically portrayed as a traditional version of the game known as the "Prisoners' Dilemma". It is common knowledge that if two peers engage in a situation known as the Prisoner's Dilemma more than once, collaboration can be achieved through the use of punishment. Nevertheless, this is not the case when there is only one interaction between peers. This short article demonstrates that Kantian peers prefer to cooperate and attain social welfare even when they interacted only once. This, dissuade peers from freeriding.
A Critical Note on Social Cloud (with Kapil Ahuja and Pradeep Singh)
The idea of a social cloud has emerged as a resource-sharing paradigm in a social network context. Undoubtedly, state-of-the-art social cloud systems demonstrate the potential of the social cloud acting as complementary to other computing paradigms such as the cloud, grid, peer-to-peer, and volunteer computing. However, we have done a critical survey of the social cloud literature and come to the conclusion that these initial efforts fail to offer a general framework of the social cloud, also, to show the uniqueness of the social cloud. We reveal that there are significant differences regarding the concept of social cloud, resource definition, resource sharing and allocation mechanism, and its application and stakeholders. This study is an attempt to express a need for a general framework of the social cloud, which can incorporate various views and resource sharing setups discussed in the literature.
Different from the current trend in the social cloud, my research focuses on an endogenous aspect of the social cloud, where agents construct their storage sharing connection in the application context. In particular, I have proposed two kinds of utility functions (namely, degree and degree-distance based). With these utility functions, I have investigated what resource-sharing network is likely to emerge when each agent aims to maximize its utility (in terms of resource availability). The focus was to study whether network formation leads to stability (no agent wants to alter the network structure in place) and efficiency (best for all agents). For this study, I followed the network game approach stem from game theory. I observed that, in the case of degree-based utility, agents always form a k-regular resource sharing network but not necessarily efficient. That is, there is a tension between stability and efficiency. However, in the case of degree-distance-based utility, agents form a disconnected resource-sharing network, where each agent has only one resource-sharing partner. Interestingly, agents form a stable network, which is also efficient. I have also investigated externalities (an impact of link addition between a pair of agents on others' resource availability). I have provided a necessary and sufficient condition under which agents observe positive and negative externalities.Â