Welcome to the Incentive-Centered Design (ICD) group in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

We believe that careful attention to individual incentives can lead to vast improvements in the design of systems that rely on information, communication and collaboration technologies to mediate interactions. We draw on theories of rational decision making, game-theoretic models of strategic interaction, and economic, psychological and social theories of motivation to understand the likely behaviors of individuals in response to various system configurations. Based on that understanding, we create or identify design options that meet various normative criteria, such as efficiency and fairness. One hallmark of our approach is that we seek to have an impact on designs of real systems-- our projects typically are inspired by a practical problem, move into the realm of abstract theorizing, and end by influencing the design of fielded systems.

Our group is closely related to the STIET (Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions) program. We have a recent Adobe PDF slide presentation about STIET and ICD.

Announcements

Rick Wash was today offered an assistant professor position at Rutgers (SCILS, School of Communications, Information and Library Science). -- (JMKM) - 26 May 2009

Haven't been keeping up with the news. Back in January, Anya passed her dissertation defense, and in early February received her Ph.D. -- (JMKM) - 20 May 2009

Rick passed his dissertation proposal defense. Congratulations! -- (JMKM) - 24 Oct 2008

Rick and Jeff had a paper accepted at the Workshop for Information System Economics (WISE) in Paris (December 08): "A Social Mechanism for Anti-Botnet Security" -- (JMKM) - 15 Oct 2008

Anya and Jeff had their paper "Bidding Strategies for Simultaneous Ascending Auctions" (with Mike Wellman and Dan Reeves) accepted in the BE Journal of Theoretical Economics.

Ben Chiao started teaching in his new position at Peking University (PKU) -- (JMKM) - 21 Sept 2008

Emilee and Rick had their paper Influences on Tag Choices in Del.icio.us accepted at CSCW 08! -- (RW) - 10 Jul 2008

Anya passed her dissertation proposal defense. Congratulations! -- (JMKM) - 09 Jul 2008

Jeff and Lian got their paper Why share in peer-to-peer networks? accepted to ICEC, the International Conference on Electronic Commerce 2008.

Rick Wash had his poster abstract Mental Models of Home Computer Security accepted to SOUPS 2008 -- The Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security.

Ben Chiao received at least four tenure-track faculty offers (Management Economics at Peking University; School of Information Science, Singapore Management University; Institute of Economics, Academica Sinica, Taiwan; and Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University). He also received at least one post-doc offer. ("At least" because not all offers were decided before Ben made his selection.) Ben is accepting the position at Peking University.

Rick Wash was awarded the 2008 Gary M. Olson Outstanding Doctoral Student award by SI. The Doctoral Committee cited the NSF grant with me (on which Rick took the lead), and his steady series of conference publications. This is the second time the award has gone to an ICD Lab member since we started a few years ago: Anya won two years ago.

We'll have a nice showing at iConference '08 at UCLA. Lian and JMM had their poster on her new project "Why Leave Wikipedia" accepted. Rick and JMM had their poster on Rick's new social firewall project, "Incentive Design for Home Computer Security" accepted, and Rick and Emilee had their paper "Understanding del.icio.us Tag Choice Using Simulations" accepted. That's 100% acceptance rate of decisions I've heard about so far. Congratulations to Rick and Lian.

Lian Jian today passed her field prelim on "Incentives for contributions and quality in user-contributed content". Congratulations! -- (JMKM) - 10 Sep 2007

I have created a page to share information about finding jobs. -- (JMKM) - 07 Sep 2007

Congratulations to Rick and Emilee: They just had their paper, "Public Bookmarks and Private Benefits: An Analysis of Incentives in Social Computing", accepted to ASIS&T Annual Meeting 2007. -- (JMKM) - 01 Apr 2007

Archive for old announcements.

Useful links

Wishlist / to do items to improve our ICD Twiki.

ICD Village (SI North) discussion space

A page to share TWiki tips with each other

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