Maintaining the ownership of information in the digital age
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- As software has transformed more and more industries, so has information played an increasingly prominent role in businesses. With information as one of the fundamental building blocks of today's economy, it is important that people maintain control over their information, and it is crucial to have proper bookkeeping and mechanisms that make sure people are properly compensated for their information. In this dissertation, we consider three topics concerning the ownership of information: 1) information aggregation with monetization, 2) value creation and allocation in the Digital Age, and 3) online privacy. We first study prediction markets, which are mechanisms that enable people to monetize privately-held information about future events by compensating them based on the accuracy of such information. Prediction markets have generally performed well in the real world, yet studies have shown that price manipulation does occur in practice. In order to maintain its usefulness and viability, we investigate the robustness of market scoring rules, a class of prediction markets, when a price manipulator is present. In the second part, we consider the way in which enterprise value is created and how it is distributed in the Digital Age. Specifically, we study consumer internet companies, whose value is often calculated not on the basis of traditional metrics such as revenue or profit, but as an increasing function of its user base. In light of this new valuation criterion, we ask the questions of which allocations of value are stable, and which are fair. We model and analyze these markets as a coalitional game, considering solution concepts such as the core and Shapley value. Lastly, we tackle the issue of online privacy on search engines. As search engines have become an essential tool for everyday life, search results on people's name have effectively become their online profile. Yet, people have limited means to influence what is shown when searchers query their names, which could be inaccurate, irrelevant, or simply outdated. This lack of control is indeed the underlying issue that led to the recent right-to-be-forgotten ruling in the European Union. We first identify the issues with the ruling and Google's implementation. We introduce a simple mechanism which respects the spirit of the ruling by giving people more power to influence search results for queries on their names. We implement a proof-of-concept search engine following the proposed mechanism, and explore experimentally the influences it might have on users' impressions on different data subjects.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Huang, Eric Hsin-Chun |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Computer Science. |
| Primary advisor | Shoham, Yoav |
| Thesis advisor | Shoham, Yoav |
| Thesis advisor | Goel, Ashish |
| Thesis advisor | Williams Vassilevska, Virginia, 1980- |
| Advisor | Goel, Ashish |
| Advisor | Williams Vassilevska, Virginia, 1980- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Eric Hsin-Chun Huang. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Computer Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Eric Hsin-Chun Huang
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...