Incentive mechanisms for societal networks
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- A "societal network" is an interconnected structure of resources and consumers that drives a societal process. Examples include roads, electricity grids, health-care systems, and waste management networks. Societal networks are plagued by two pressing problems: (i) the demand for resources exceeds their supply, especially at "peak'' hours, and (ii) inefficiencies due to wastage are highly permeable, i.e., while the loss to an individual is very small, the overall loss to the societal network as a whole can be substantial. This suggests that small changes in the behavior of each user can lead to significant gains in the efficiency of societal networks. More importantly, such a change in each user is necessary to combat systemic problems such as congestion. There is a strong urgency to the problems in societal networks -- the scale of the problems has reached epic proportions. Fortunately, help is at hand. Over the past few decades, there have been great technological inventions such as the creation of the global Internet, the Web, cellular telephony and cloud computing. Now is the right time to address the problems in societal networks making use of the ubiquitous presence of smart sensing technology. This thesis presents a first attempt at that -- making use of a variety of sensing technology to monitor user behavior, informing the users about their actions and incentivizing them to adopt a desirable behavior. This thesis develops a general approach to affect change in the behavior of the users of societal networks. At the first level, it is based on fine-grained sensing of user behavior and communicating this information to a platform, and using incentives of monetary, social and other kinds to change user behavior. At the second level, the approach is concerned with the design of low-cost and accurate sensors, and backend algorithms to inform, engage and incentivize users to affect the desired behavior change. We describe some pilot projects which we have conducted to test and verify the effectiveness of this approach. The first project, INSTANT (Infosys-Stanford Traffic project), was conducted over 6 months in Bangalore, India, to incentivize roughly 14,000 commuters of Infosys Technologies to shift their commute to off-peak hours. The second project is a recycling experiment conducted over one week at Stanford to incentivize the members of the Stanford community to recycle. Third, we outline our contributions to Steptacular, an employee wellness program run at Accenture, USA. Finally, we describe CAPRI (Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives), a research project currently underway at Stanford University to incentivize off-peak travel and "off-center" parking.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Merugu, Deepak |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering |
| Primary advisor | Prabhakar, Balaji, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Prabhakar, Balaji, 1967- |
| Thesis advisor | Johari, Ramesh, 1976- |
| Thesis advisor | Van Roy, Benjamin |
| Advisor | Johari, Ramesh, 1976- |
| Advisor | Van Roy, Benjamin |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Deepak Merugu. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Deepak Merugu
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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