Pricing WiFi at Starbucks: issues in online mechanism design

We consider the problem of designing mechanisms for online problems in which agents arrive over time and the mechanism is unaware of the agent until the agent announces her arrival. Problems of this sort are becoming extremely common particularly in a wide variety of problems involving wireless networking. We show how the standard results of mechanism design can be modified to apply to this setting, provide conditions under which efficient and incentive compatible mechanisms exist and analyze several important online models including wireless networks and web serving.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SIGECOM
• Authors: Eric J. Friedman, David C. Parkes
• Keywords: Important Online Models, Incentive Compatible Mechanisms, Online Problems, SIGECOM 2003