Network Economics

Networks bring together technological constraints, economic incentives, and strategic behavior. Our research examines how these factors interact to shape the performance and behavior of networked systems, with applications to wireless communications and other shared-resource environments.

Competition and Resource Allocation

Wireless networks increasingly operate in environments where firms compete for customers while sharing or allocating resources that affect the quality of service. Our research develops techno-economic models of competition in such settings, with particular emphasis on how resource constraints, congestion, and the ability to reallocate resources shape market outcomes. We apply these models to problems including spectrum sharing and integrated sensing and communications.

Selected Work

T. Nguyen, H. Zhou, R. A. Berry, M. L. Honig, and R. Vohra, "The Cost of Free Spectrum," Operations Research, vol. 64, no. 6, pp. 1217-1229, 2016.

M. Felix and R. Berry, "The Right Amount of Competition in Mobile Telecommunication – a Game Theoretic Framework," TPRC 2025.

Learning and Strategic Behavior

In many networked environments, agents make decisions with incomplete information and must learn from their own experience and from the behavior of others. Our research examines how information, incentives, and strategic behavior interact in such settings, including how career concerns and observational learning affect collective decisions, and how learning agents behave when competing in congested markets.

Selected Work

T. Le, V. Subramanian, and R. Berry, "Information Cascades With Noise," IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 239-251, June 2017.

P. Poojary and R. Berry, "Impact of Fake Agents on Information Cascades," IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 2593-2605, July-Aug. 2025.