an economic model of the worldwide web
We believe that much novel insight into the worldwide web can be obtained from taking into account the important fact that it is created, used, and run by selfish optimizing agents: users, document authors, and search engines. On-going theoretical and experimental analysis of a simple abstract model of www creation and search based on user utilities illustrates this point: We find that efficiency is higher when the utilities are more clustered, and that power-law statistics of document degrees emerge very naturally in this context. More importantly, our work sets up many more elaborate questions, related, e.g., to www search algorithms seen as author incentives, to search engine spam, and to search engine quality and competition.
economic model utility function power laws game theory price of anarchy market web search