CS 486 resources:

Potential final exam topics can be found here.

Answers to the midterm can be found here.

Potential exam topics can be found here.

Resources:

Some links to advice on developing a business plan:

General advice on starting a small business.
Sample business plans and advice on chafting a business plan. Includes information on e-commerce businesses. Some fluff and jargon, and some useful info.
A nice example of a business plan for a Spanish-language Web-based medical info business.
An example of a business plan to provide secure distribution of electronic music over the Web. (see if you can find any holes in their plan ...)
Interactive Business Planner A Web-based tool to help you organize the information neeed for a business plan. This could be very helpful in your assignment.

Readings:

Agents:

Crypto/Security:

An introduction to PGP and public-key encryption. Lots of information on how public-key and PKI systems work. Not much detail on why public-key encryption is actually hard.
Laudon - ch5: Overview of current technology. Also talks about SSL, VeriSign, the infrastructure problems with security, and how it applies to e-commerce. Nice overview, not too technical.
RSA faq - more technical detail on generating keys.
In particular, RSA labs has a very nice explanation of the difficulty of factoring large numbers, using Moore's Law to estimate future security.
A brief explanation of the mathematics of RSA, including an example.
distributed.net An online community devoted to developing massively distributed applications for breaking cryptographic protocols, including DES and RC5.
list of online resources about cryptography and security.
the International PGP homepage.
a white paper from Sun that provides a nice overview of PKI.
A collection of links about Public Key Infrastructure.
A fun paper by Fagin, Naor, and Winkler on zero-information protocols.
A paper describing the implementation of RC5.

Search Engines and the Structure of the Web

Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine Sergay Brin and Lawrence Page. This paper discusses how Google works, in particular its PageRank algorithm.
Evaluating Topic-driven Web Crawlers Mentxer, Pant, Srinivasan. A summary of how different web crawlers work, with experiments comparing efficiency.
The structure of the Web Jon Kleinberg and Steve Lawrence. A nice 2-page Science article summarizing Web structure and the idea of hubs and authorities.
Searching the World Wide Web Steve Lawrence and Lee Giles. A short and readable Science article explaining their technique for estimating the size of the Web and the coverage of different search engines.
Search Engine Watch. An online trade mag about search engines. Lots of news releases, some evaluations, and articles about the industry.

Trust and Reputation

Web Services:

Discovery Mechanisms:

Shopbots/Price-finding agents.
- A Scalable Comparison-shopping Agent for the World Wide Web.
- Agents that Buy and Sell. Maes, Guttman and Moukas.
Recommender Systems
- Reidl, et al: Recommender Systems in E-commerce. WHy recommenders are useful for e-commerce.
- Combining Content-based and Collaborative Recommendation Marko Balabanovic and Yoav Shoham. A nice overview of the strengths and weaknesses of different types of recommender systems.
- Here is an article from Discover about social networks. The authors use Amazon's "People who liked this book liked ..." feature to identify communities or cliques of books read by the same people.
XML
- Notes on XML from class 3/5/03.
- A free set of tutorials on XML.
- More free XML resources.
- Heterogeneous Product Description in e-Commerce
- www.xml.com
Data Mining
- Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Search Engine (how Google works)
- Data Mining Techniques

Negotiation:

Game Theory Intro:
- An Introduction to Game Theory
- Gametheory.net Lots of resources on learning and teaching game theory.
Learning in Games
- Conjectural Equilibrium in Multiagent Learning Michael Wellman and Junling Hu. Examines learning in an environment where other agents also learn, defines an appropriate solution concept, and characterizes when it's worth learning in the first place.
- Friend-or-Foe Q-learning in General-Sum Games Michael Littman. Extensions of Q-learning to general-sum games. Strong convergence guarantees.
- Correlated Q-learning A generalization of the above papers, allowing Q-learning agents to discover more general equilibrium concepts.
Auctions:
- A Parameterization of the Auction Design Space. Wurman, Wellman, and Walsh.
- Flexible Double Auctions for Electronic Commerce: Theory and Implementation. Wurman, Walsh, Wellman.
- Auction Protocols for Decentralized Scheduling. Michael Wellman, WIlliam Walsh, Peter Wurman, and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason. Using Vickrey auctions to schedule shared resources in a distributed system.
- Collusive Bidding: Lessons From the FCC Spectrum Auctions. Peter Cramton and Jesse Schwartz. A nice analysis of the issues involved in designing auctions to sell FCC spectrum licenses.
- Laudon, Chapter 13
Basics of Market Mechanisms
Automated Contracting:

Payment Mechanisms:

Laudon, Chapter 6.
Evaluating and Selecting Digital Payment Mechanisms. MacKie-Mason and White.
A long list of proposed online payment mechanisms.
More links to proposed payment systems.
Micropayments
- The Siren Song of Internet Micropayments An article by Steve Crocker (founder of CyberCoin) talking about the challenges of implementing a micropayment system.
- Micropayments Revisited Silvio Micali and Ronald Rivest. Explains the lottery-based system of micropayment aggregation.
- Thoughts by Scott McCloud on how micropayments would change the online comics industry.
- And a rebuttal
Home page at CMU for the Netbill project.

Economics of Information

Markets and the New Economy. A nice overview of the issues involved in selling information goods on the internet.
Markets for Information Goods Hal Varian. More discussion of the peculiar properties of information.
Pricing Information Goods Hal Varian. A more technnical discussion of the issues involved with pricing information.
Model Selection in an Information Economy: Choosing What to Learn Brooks, et al. A description of different price schedules and the ease or difficulty of learning the parameters of these schedules.
Laudon, Chapter 14

Watermarking

Fair Use

B2B

Supply Chains

Advertising/clickthrough

Business Models