[Mnet-devel] another paper

[zooko at zooko.com]

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~marbach/PUBL/adhoc.ps.gz

I haven't read it, but I saw Prof. Marbach give a talk about it recently.
Basically, he shows how, given a nice micropayment system, nodes can
effectively choose prices for their resources such their choices fall into a
Nash equilibrium and the result is socially optimal.

He is be commended for including a simple, feasible algorithm instead of merely
a proof that some such algorithm could exist.  It is intriguing that his
algorithm is both simpler than and more sophisticated than the various
algorithms that we tried at Mojo Nation.  The only hole in the idea is that it
isn't clear if his algorithm will adapt with sufficient alacrity to changing
market conditions.

Another minor hole is that the algorithm takes "the user's preference function"
as one of the inputs, and it might be tricky to express that with sufficient
accuracy, especially (again) as it changes over time.

--Z

P.S.  This paper is described in terms of Digital Silk Road style emergent
transport on ad hoc wireless networks, but as far as I can tell the exact same
conditions and the exact same solution apply to the question of how to price
your storage space in Mojo Nation / Mnet.