Introduction to the Special Section on Internet and Network Economics

In this special section of Algorithmica, we have included several articles based on presentations made, during December 12–14, 2007, at the third Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE 2007) in San Diego, California. The workshop provided a forum for researchers as well as practitioners to exchange innovative ideas and to learn about each other’s efforts and results. It reflects an emerging trend in merging theories, methodologies, and applications in computer science, economics, mathematics, management sciences to manage increasing problems motivated by Internet activities. The special section chose to focus on the market problems that have attracted growing attention in recent years. Four articles covering two recent active topics have been included, covering the prediction market and the sponsored search market. All selected articles have been significantly improved from the workshop presentations, taking into consideration helpful feedback from the conference presentations and reviewers’ reports. Chen, et al., made a thorough study of user strategic behavior on the prediction market with market scoring rule market makers. While truthful behavior under myopic traders was known, they studied in this work the non-myopic strategies of traders and developed information structures that lead to truthful behavior, for both the finite time horizon model and the infinite time horizon model.