Abstract: Online social networks provide a popular, cost-effective and scalable framework for sharing user-generated content or services. However, the self-interest of users of such networks generates intrinsic incentive problems. The body of work from which this talk derives addresses these incentive problems from several points of view. This particular talk begins by analyzing the trade-offs (to each individual agent) between the costs and benefits of forming links to collect information (from other agents) and the costs and benefits of producing information personally, and the strategic implications of these trade-offs. A central point of the analysis is that information is assumed to be heterogeneous (rather than homogeneous as in previous analyses) and that agents value this heterogeneity. The analysis has implications for the topology that emerges endogenously. For large populations, the implication is that the topology is necessarily of a core-periphery type: hub agents (at the core of the network) produce and share most of the information, while spoke agents (at the periphery of the network) derive most of their information from hub agents, producing little of it themselves. As the population becomes larger, the number of hub agents and the total amount of information produced grow in proportion to the total population. These 'scale-free' conclusions had been conjectured for many networks ¨C such as the World-Wide-Web ¨C but not derived in any formal framework, and are in stark contradiction to the 'law of the few' that had been established in previous work (e.g. by Goyal et al), under the assumption that information is homogeneous and part of the endowment of agents, rather than heterogeneous and produced. Bio: Mihaela van der Schaar is Chancellor's Professor of Electrical Engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include network economics and game theory, online learning, multimedia networking, communication, processing, and systems, real-time stream mining, dynamic multi-user networks and system designs. She is an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Lecturer of the Communications Society for 2011-2012, the Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and a member of the Editorial Board of the IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing. She received an NSF CAREER Award (2004), the Best Paper Award from IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (2005), the Okawa Foundation Award (2006), the IBM Faculty Award (2005, 2007, 2008), the Most Cited Paper Award from EURASIP: Image Communications Journal (2006), the Gamenets Conference Best Paper Award (2011) and the 2011 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Darlington Award Best Paper Award. She received three ISO awards for her contributions to the MPEG video compression and streaming international standardization activities, and holds 33 granted US patents. For more information about her research visit: http://medianetlab.ee.ucla.edu/