Networked Markets: Intermediaries & Market Power

Speaker: Adam Wierman
Affiliation: Caltech

Abstract: Classical models of competition focus on a single, centralized marketplace in which the identity of players has no effect on the prices, outcomes, etc. However, often the marketplace is not really a single market, but is instead a network of interconnected markets loosely defined by a graph of feasible exchanges, e.g., electricity markets are constrained by underlying power grid. In this talk, I will overview recent advances in the study of networked markets, focusing on networked Cournot competition. My focus will be on the role of intermediaries and the identification and curtailment of market power in such marketplaces, and I will use the context of electricity markets to highlight the importance of such insights.

Biography: Adam Wierman is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where he is a founding member of the Rigorous Systems Research Group (RSRG) and maintains a popular blog called Rigor + Relevance. His research interests center around resource allocation and scheduling decisions in computer systems and services. He received the 2011 ACM SIGMETRICS Rising Star award, the 2014 IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize, and has been coauthor on papers that received of best paper awards at ACM SIGMETRICS, IEEE INFOCOM, IFIP Performance (twice), IEEE Green Computing Conference, IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, and ACM GREENMETRICS.

For more information contact Professor van der Schaar (mihaela@ee.ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Nov 30, 2015
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Location:
EE-IV Shannon Room #54-134
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095