INFO 6230 - Games, Economic Behavior, and the Internet

Fall. 3 credits.

Enrollment limited to: graduate standing or permission of instructor.

A. Ghosh.

There are many settings on the Internet where agents make decisions that involve responding to incentives, trading off costs and benefits, or strategizing about the behavior of other agents. Examples include online auctions (on Ebay, or advertising auctions); voting— either explicitly, such as ratings on Digg or implicitly, as in search engine rankings; crowdsourcing contests as in TopCoder or Innocentive; labor markets as in Mechanical Turk or ODesk; peer-to-peer file sharing; social lending platforms, and a vast range of social computing systems.

This course will examine models and theoretical foundations— such as information elicitation, preference aggregration, contest design, auctions, matching markets, public goods games— that are relevant to economic behavior on the Internet, as well as discuss the design and behavior of actual systems.