[Colloquium] REMINDER: Xi (Alice) Gao, Harvard

[Dawn Ellis]

When:     Monday, February 24th at 11am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room #526

Speaker:  Xi (Alice) Gao, Harvard

Title:       Understanding Incentives in Social Computing

This talk focuses on several work I've done in the field of social
computing, where human intelligence is harnessed in algorithmic problem
solving.  I aim to design algorithms and mechanisms that have good
theoretical properties and perform well in practice.  As an example, I will
introduce our online experiment on peer prediction mechanisms,
demonstrating the usefulness of online experimentation in evaluating
theoretical mechanisms.  For the goal of collecting truthful reports of
subjective information, peer prediction theory focuses on designing
monetary rewards to induce a truthful equilibrium among the participants,
by using the stochastic correlation of participants' information.  However,
these mechanisms also admit uninformative equilibria where participants
provide no useful information.  We conduct the first online experiment of a
peer prediction mechanism in a repeated setting.  Our results show that, in
contrast to the theory, participants are not truthful and successfully
coordinate on uninformative equilibria. In the absence of peer prediction,
however, most players are consistently truthful, suggesting that these
mechanisms may be harmful when truthful reporting has similar cost to
strategic behavior.  I will also briefly describe our theoretical analyses
of non-myopic participants' equilibrium behavior in prediction markets, and
conclude by presenting my future research directions.

These are joint work with Ryan P. Adams, Yiling Chen, Rick Goldstein, Ian
A. Kash, Andrew Mao, and Jie Zhang.

Host:  Yury Makarychev, yury at ttic.edu


-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Coordinator,
Bookkeeper
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

TTIC
6045 S. Kenwood Ave.
Chicago, IL. 60637
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