Re: [freehaven-dev] Thoughts on general equilibrium for mix-acc paper

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 04:56:54PM -0500, Michael J Freedman wrote:
[snip]
> the effects of our actions.  There's quite a bit of literature in this
> subject, both in economics and even in networking, often motivated by game
> theoretic approaches.
[snip] 
> Time n:  This process iterates and the network stabilizes.  If we do this
> correctly, I might submit that the network equilibria approaches
> optimality.  Okay, that's too strong a conjecture, but you get my point.
> 
> All handwaving, of course.
> 
> Thoughts?
 
I agree. My intuition also says it's "a good idea". But the simple
analysis (where we assume that people are either good or bad, and in
equilibrium the bad people have been noticed so we only use the good ones)
is insufficient to represent the notion of "not full" and "too full"
in terms of bandwidth.

Would it be valuable to think of this in terms of a prisoner's dilemma
or similar game theory problem? I don't really have background in that,
and I'm having trouble figuring out who the two sides might be in such
an analysis (since it's not symmetric).

But I think it would be very valuable to use a framework which is both
enlightening and also generally accepted in the economics (or whichever)
community. Indeed, in some sense we have a responsibility to talk about
this some in the paper, since the actual advance we're describing isn't
very complicated.

Mike, can you look farther into this?

Thanks,
--Roger