Dr Y Narahari Home Page

Y. NARAHARI

RECENT SURVEY PAPERS

This page lists recent survey articles co-authored by me. Many of these papers can be downloaded. If you are unable to download any of the papers, please do send email to me and I will be happy to send a softcopy to you.

A. Radhika, Y. Narahari, Deepak Bagchi, P. Suresh, and S.V. Subrahmanya. Mechanism Design Problems in Carbon Economics. In: Journal of the Indian Institute of Science , Special Issue on Advances in Electrical Sciences, Volume 90, Number 3, July-September 2010, pp. 381-411.

Reduction of carbon emissions is of paramount importance in the context of global warming and climate change. Countries and global companies are now engaged in understanding systematic ways of solving carbon economics problems, aimed ultimately at achieving well defined emission targets. This paper proposes mechanism design as an approach to solving carbon economics problems. The paper first introduces carbon economics issues in the world today and next focuses on carbon economics problems facing global industries. The paper identifies four problems faced by global industries: carbon credit allocation (CCA), carbon credit buying (CCB), carbon credit selling (CCS), and carbon credit exchange (CCE). It is argued that these problems are best addressed as mechanism design problems. The discipline of mechanism design is founded on game theory and is concerned with settings where a social planner faces the problem of aggregating the announced preferences of multiple agents into a collective decision, when the actual preferences are not known publicly. The paper provides an overview of mechanism design and presents the challenges involved in designing mechanisms with desirable properties. To illustrate the application of mechanism design in carbon economics, the paper describes in detail one specific problem, the carbon credit allocation problem.

Y. Narahari and S. Gujar. Auctions in Electronic Commerce. Invited Book Chapter in: The Handbook of Technology Management, John Wiley and Sons, Volume 3, pp. 612-625, 2009.

In the recent times, the use of auctions in electronic commerce and electronic business applications has been growing dramatically. This chapter provides a glimpse of different types of auctions which could be deployed in high-tech e-commerce and e-business applications. The chapter describes three applications in detail: spectrum auctions for allocating radio spectrum licenses, procurement auctions which could be used in strategic sourcing, and sponsored search auctions on the web. The chapter also describes key game theory issues in the design of auctions and presents certain common challenges in their deployment.

Y. Narahari and Ramasuri Narayanam. Game Theory. Invited Book Chapter: The Handbook of Technology Management, John Wiley and Sons, Volume 1, pp. 68-80, 2009

Game theory is a powerful mathematical tool to study conflict and cooperation when multiple rational and intelligent decision makers interact. In this chapter, we introduce some key notions in game theory and explain their significance in strategic decision making, using illustrative examples. The notions we discuss are: strategic form games, dominant strategy equilibria, Nash equilibrium, two-person Nash bargaining problem, cooperative games, the core, and the Shapley value.

D. Garg, Y. Narahari, and S. Gujar. Foundations of Mechanism Design: A Tutorial. Part 1: Key Concepts and Classical Results. In: Sadhana, Indian Academy Proceedings in Engineering Sciences, Volume 33, Number 2, April 2008, pp. 83-130.

Mechanism design, an important tool in microeconomics, has found widespread applications in modeling and solving decentralized design problems in many branches of engineering, notably computer science, electronic commerce, and network economics. The objective of this two part paper is to provide a tutorial introduction to the foundations and key results in mechanism design theory. Part 1 focuses on basic concepts and classical results which form the foundation of mechanism design theory.

D. Garg, Y. Narahari, and S. Gujar. Foundations of Mechanism Design: A Tutorial. Part 2 : Advanced Concepts and Results. In: Sadhana, Indian Academy Proceedings in Engineering Sciences, Volume 33, Number 2, April 2008, pp. 131-174.

This is the second part of the tutorial on mechanism design. This part presents key advanced concepts and results in mechanism design.

T.S. Chandrashekar, Y. Narahari, Charles H. Rosa, Devadatta Kulkarni, Pankaj Dayama, and Jeffrey D. Tew. Auction Based Mechanisms for Electronic Procurement. In: IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, Volume 4, Number 3, July 2007, pp. 297-321.

Since the burst of the dot com bubble, many procurement professionals and purchasing managers have begun to question the ability of the Internet to redefine procurement processes within their firms. In this article we set out to show that this would be a misplaced sense of deja vu because the Internet along with a milieu of decision technologies based on Game Theory and Optimization is proving to be a significant tool in the hands of procurement professionals. Sans all the hype, the dot com phenomena has left behind useful ideas including that of e-platforms for on-line auctions. Building upon this core conceptual construct familiar to most procurement professionals, we set out to survey the exciting field of research this has opened up with a vast potential for immediate and gainful applications. We review the existing state-of-the-art in this field, track its recent developments and classify the models available for different procurement scenarios. We also provide pointers to areas that require further fundamental as well as applied research which calls for the attention of not just academic researchers but also practicing professionals. In our review, we present the mathematical formulations under each of the above categories, bring out the game theoretic and computational issues involved in solving the problems, and summarize the current art. We also present a significant case study of auction based e-procurement at General Motors.

Y. Narahari and Pankaj Dayama. Combinatorial Auctions for Electronic Business. In: Sadhana (Special Issue on Electronic Commerce and Electronic Business, Volume 30, Parts 2 and 3, April/June 2005, pp. 179-212.

Combinatorial auctions have recently generated significant interest as an automated mechanism for buying and selling bundles of goods. They are proving to be extremely useful in numerous e-business applications such as e-selling, e-procurement, e-logistics, and B2B exchanges. In this article, we introduce combinatorial auctions and bring out important issues in the design of combinatorial auctions. We also highlight important contributions in current research in this area. This survey emphasizes combinatorial auctions as applied to electronic business situations.

Y. Narahari, C.V.L. Raju, K. Ravikumar, and Sourabh Shah. Dynamic Pricing Models for Electronic Business. In: Sadhana (Special Issue on Electronic Commerce and Electronic Business), Volume 30, Parts 2 and 3, April/June 2005, pp. 231-255.

Dynamic pricing is the dynamic adjustment of prices to consumers depending upon the value these customers attribute to a product or service. Today's digital economy is ready for dynamic pricing, however recent research has shown that the prices will have to be adjusted in fairly sophisticated ways, based on sound mathematical models, to derive the benefits of dynamic pricing. This article attempts to survey different models that have been used in dynamic pricing. We first motivate dynamic pricing and presents underlying concepts, with several examples, and explain conditions under which dynamic pricing is likely to succeed. We then bring out the role of models in computing dynamic prices. The models surveyed include inventory based models, data driven models, auctions, and machine learning. We present a detailed example of an e-business market to show the use of reinforcement learning in dynamic pricing.