Messan Arnaud Lawson: Network Pricing and the Price of Anarchy

Messan Arnaud Lawson is a senior student at UC Santa Cruz majoring in Information Systems Management. He plans on attending graduate school so as to eventually lead a career in research or professorship. For that reason he participated in the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Information Technology this summer 2007 to have a better perspective of what research careers entail. Supervised by Professor John Musacchio in the Information Systems and Management of Technology Lab, he was able to participate in the study of a network pricing models. Overall this experience was extremely valuable in terms of how it exposes one to all the benefits as well as challenges existing in research processes. It was also socially beneficial since one was able to interact with professors, graduate and undergraduate students, etc.

Network pricing models basically help analyze how networks such as the internet are priced and some of the ways they could be improved to maximize the benefits that both network service providers plus their customers gain from being involved in the model. This analysis involves numerous factors (providers’ profit, users’ utility, network capacity, link prices, latency, flows, etc), which thus increases its complexity. Being part of the study Arnaud participated in creating a computer system capable of accounting for all such factors and helping determine the optimal economic benefits present in various network configurations. The advantages of the system are: it allows for easy alteration of network setups, quick computation and easy analysis of results. Future plans are to render the system more flexible and realistic by making it handle additional types of data.