Adam Isaac Juda

Small Worlds and Regional Innovation

Small-world networks have attracted much theoretical attention and are widely thought to enhance creativity. Yet empirical studies of their evolution and evidence of their benefits remain scarce. We develop and exploit a novel database on patent coauthorship to investigate the effects of collaboration networks on innovation. Our analysis reveals the existence of regional small-world structures and the emergence and disappearance of giant components in patent collaboration networks. Using statistical models, we test and fail to find evidence that small-world structure (cohesive clusters connected by occasional nonlocal ties) enhances innovative productivity within geographic regions. We do find that both shorter path lengths and larger connected components correlate with increased innovation. We discuss the implications of our findings for future social network research and theory as well as regional innovation policies.

Pricing guidance in ad sale negotiations: the PrintAds example

We consider negotiations between publishers and advertisers in a marketplace for ads. Motivated by Googles online PrintAds system which is such a marketplace, we focus on the role of the market runner in improving market efficiency. We abstract the problem of pricing guidance where the market runner provides an initial price-point for negotiations based on data analysis. The problem is nuanced because the market runner can not fully reveal the price data for any of the publishers. We introduce two solutions for pricing guidance, the first using clustering and the second using support vector machines, and present experimental evaluation of our methods. Pricing guidance by the market runner is a novel direction, and we expect more research in the future.