COMPETITIVE ECONOMY AS A RANKING DEVICE OVER NETWORKS

The Technology

A novel approach to generating a ranking over items in a network (e.g., of web pages connected by links or of articles connected by citations). We transform the network into an exchange economy, and take the resulting competitive equilibrium prices of the network's nodes as their ranking.
The widely used Google's PageRank comes as a special case when the nodes are represented by Cobb-Douglas utility maximizers. We further use the economic metaphor to combine between the Citation Index and PageRank by imposing a redistributive taxing scheme. We also discuss an interaction between Google and agents who bias their link intensities in response to Google's PageRank. It turns out that the outcome is related to the equilibrium\ of the economy with the minimum utility function.

Project manager

Oren Calfon
VP Business Development, ICT

Project researchers

Ehud Lehrer
T.A.U Tel Aviv University, Exact Sciences
School of Mathematical Sciences

Ady Pauzner
T.A.U Tel Aviv University, Social Sciences
School of Economics