Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Essays on Digital Content Provision and Consumption(2022) Wang, Chutian; Zhou, Bobby; Joshi, Yogesh V; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Consumption of digital content has become an inseparable part of consumers' lives today. As providers of digital content, media platforms continuously seek to pursue pricing and product design strategies that increase their profits. This dissertation studies media platforms' digital content provision and consumers' consumption decisions. In the first essay, we focus on the pricing of digital content and analyze the impact of consumers' endogenous content consumption on platforms' paywall strategies. Paywalls increase subscription revenues for platforms, but they also impact content consumption and thus advertising revenues. We build an analytical model that endogenizes consumers' content consumption decisions. We find that under moderate ad rates, a metered paywall under which a limited amount of content is provided for free is optimal when consumers display sufficient heterogeneity in their costs of consuming content. We also study how the amount of free content and the subscription price vary with changes in the advertising rate and consumer preference. In the second essay, we analyze the accuracy of news reported by the news media. When consumers are seeking the truth and accurate reporting is costly, determining the optimal level of accuracy in reporting is a strategic decision for a profit-maximizing media firm. We build an analytical model to study this media firm decision. When consumers and the media firm are both initially uncertain about the true state of the world, we show that the media firm always chooses full accuracy if investigation and reporting are of low cost. However, if achieving accuracy is sufficiently costly, the media firm provides news only when consumers' priors regarding the truth are not too extreme, so that they see enough value in news consumption. Interestingly, consumers' truth-seeking and the firm's profit maximization can lead to reporting inaccuracy and exaggeration of the more likely state a priori. We also discuss the implications of polarization in consumers’ prior beliefs and the media firm’s different objectives on the accuracy of news.Item ADVENTURES ON NETWORKS: DEGREES AND GAMES(2015) Pal, Siddharth; Makowski, Armand; La, Richard; Electrical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A network consists of a set of nodes and edges with the edges representing pairwise connections between nodes. Examples of real-world networks include the Internet, the World Wide Web, social networks and transportation networks often modeled as random graphs. In the first half of this thesis, we explore the degree distributions of such random graphs. In homogeneous networks or graphs, the behavior of the (generic) degree of a single node is often thought to reflect the degree distribution of the graph defined as the usual fractions of nodes with given degree. To study this preconceived notion, we introduce a general framework to discuss the conditions under which these two degree distributions coincide asymptotically in large random networks. Although Erdos-Renyi graphs along with other well known random graph models satisfy the aforementioned conditions, we show that there might be homogeneous random graphs for which such a conclusion may fail to hold. A counterexample to this common notion is found in the class of random threshold graphs. An implication of this finding is that random threshold graphs cannot be used as a substitute to the Barabasi-Albert model for scale-free network modeling, as proposed in some works. Since the Barabasi-Albert model was proposed, other network growth models were introduced that were shown to generate scale-free networks. We study one such basic network growth model, called the fitness model, which captures the inherent attributes of individual nodes through fitness values (drawn from a fitness distribution) that influence network growth. We characterize the tail of the network-wide degree distribution through the fitness distribution and demonstrate that the fitness model is indeed richer than the Barabasi-Albert model, in that it is capable of producing power-law degree distributions with varying parameters along with other non-Poisson degree distributions. In the second half of the thesis, we look at the interactions between nodes in a game-theoretic setting. As an example, these nodes could represent interacting agents making decisions over time while the edges represent the dependence of their payoffs on the decisions taken by other nodes. We study learning rules that could be adopted by the agents so that the entire system of agents reaches a desired operating point in various scenarios motivated by practical concerns facing engineering systems. For our analysis, we abstract out the network and represent the problem in the strategic-form repeated game setting. We consider two classes of learning rules -- a class of better-reply rules and a new class of rules, which we call, the class of monitoring rules. Motivated by practical concerns, we first consider a scenario in which agents revise their actions asynchronously based on delayed payoff information. We prove that, under the better-reply rules (when certain mild assumptions hold), the action profiles played by the agents converge almost surely to a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (PSNE) with finite expected convergence time in a large class of games called generalized weakly acyclic games (GWAGs). A similar result is shown to hold for the monitoring rules in GWAGs and also in games satisfying a payoff interdependency structure. Secondly, we investigate a scenario in which the payoff information is unreliable, causing agents to make erroneous decisions occasionally. When the agents follow the better-reply rules and the payoff information becomes more accurate over time, we demonstrate the agents will play a PSNE with probability tending to one in GWAGs. Under a similar setting, when the agents follow the monitoring rule, we show that the action profile weakly converges to certain characterizable PSNE(s). Finally, we study a scenario where an agent might erroneously execute an intended action from time to time. Under such a setting, we show that the monitoring rules ensure that the system reaches PSNE(s) which are resilient to deviations by potentially multiple agents.Item Game-Theoretic Strategies for Dynamic Behavior in Cognitive Radio Networks(2010) Wu, Yongle; Liu, K. J. Ray; Electrical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Cognitive radio technology is a new revolutionary communication paradigm which allows flexible access to spectrum resources and leads to efficient spectrum sharing. Recent studies have shown that cognitive radio is a promising approach to improve efficiency of spectrum utilization, because wireless users are capable of accessing the spectrum in an intelligent and adaptive manner. The theory of cognitive radio is however still immature to fully understand its broader impacts on the design of future wireless networks. This dissertation contributes to the advancement of cognitive radio technology by analyzing wireless users' interaction in a network and developing game-theoretic frameworks to suppress selfish and malicious behaviors, with the goal to improve system performance by stimulating selfish users and enhance network security against malicious users. We first develop a cheat-proof repeated spectrum sharing game, which provides the incentive for selfish users to cooperate with each other and reveal their private information truthfully. We propose specific cooperation rules based on the maximum total throughput and proportional fairness criteria, and investigate the impact of spectrum sensing duration on system performance. We also consider the situation where a group of selfish users collude for higher payoffs. We propose a novel multi-winner spectrum auction framework which did not exist in auction literature, and develop collusion-resistant auction mechanisms to suppress collusive behavior. In addition, we apply the semi-definite programming relaxation to significantly reduce the complexity of algorithms. When malicious users are taken into consideration, we apply game-theoretic tools to suppress potential malicious behavior in cognitive radio networks. Specifically, we model the anti-jamming defense as a zero-sum game, and derive the optimal strategy for secondary users to execute in face of jamming threats. Moreover, we propose learning schemes for secondary users to gain knowledge of adversaries. Finally, we consider security countermeasures against eavesdroppers, and propose a cooperative paradigm that primary users improve secrecy with the help of trustworthy secondary users. We derive the achievable pair of primary users' secrecy rate and secondary users' transmission rate under various circumstances, and model the interaction between primary users and secondary users as a Stackelberg game.