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Fostering innovation, efficiency, and sustainability through incentives.
The Internet is one of the greatest success stories of our times, however it faces some fundamental challenges. Its most obvious shortcomings stem from its unpredictable behavior and unreliable service, but there are also deeper issues such as underutilization of resources and a resistance to evolution. The technological and economic aspects of these issues are inseparable --- any change to the Internet's structure or protocols must be driven by economic considerations, just as users' participation in any new protocols would be driven by economic incentives; moreover, efficient allocation of resources such as bandwidth must take into account the economic benefit from that allocation. Understanding and solving these problems therefore inherently entails an algorithmic as well as game theoretic approach. Analytic tools from research on "algorithmic mechanism design" and "the price of anarchy", developed over the past few years by the theoretical computer science community, will be immensely helpful here.
Put a slightly more detailed explanation here, which can be aimed at general computer scientists.
Shuchi Chawla, Jason Hartline, Anna Karlin, Claire Mathieu, and Tim Roughgarden.
A busy intersection, or a traffic jam.