Special Issue on Pricing and Incentives in Networks and Systems: Guest Editors' Introduction

Today’s communication networks and networked systems are highly complex and heterogeneous and are often owned by profit-making entities. For new technologies or infrastructure designs to be adopted, they must not only be based on sound engineering performance considerations but also present the right economic incentives. Recent changes in regulations of the telecommunication industry make such economic considerations even more urgent. For instance, new concerns such as network neutrality have a significant impact on the evolution of communication networks. At the same time, communication networks and networked systems support increasing economic activity based on applications and services such as cloud computing, social networks, and peer-to-peer networks. These applications pose new challenges including the development of good pricing and incentive mechanisms to promote effective system-wide behavior. Similarly, the security and privacy of these applications are themselves heavily dependent on economic considerations, which therefore need to be fully understood. To address these questions, this special issue brings together a relevant set of state-of-the-art research contributions on complementary topics including communication networks, wireless networks, web content and security, and the use of multidisciplinary approaches ranging from game theory and economic modeling to algorithms and mechanism design, and including empirical studies