Press Release and 
podcast -- Yahoo Answers users seek advice, opinion, as well as expertise in research by Mark Ackerman, Lada Adamic and STIET fellow Eytan Bakshy Press Release -- Bluffing in prediction markets research by Rahul Sami and STIET fellow, Stanko Dimitrov
Podcast discussing the STIET research program with Jeff MacKie-Mason and Tom Finholt
STIET video showing lifesize, uncompressed fiber-optic video conference from UM Atkins room to WSU via OptIPortalJeffrey MacKie-Mason
Arthur W. Burks Professor of Information and Computer Science, and Professor of Economics and Public Policy
4-5:30 pm
UM: 411 West Hall
WSU: 313 State Hall (via videoconference)
The draft article is available below.
User-contributed content as an input to the production of information services or goods is not new, but it is growing rapidly in significance. Open-source software, Wikipedia, and Flickr are but a few examples: there are a surprising variety of information products and services now relying on user-contributed content. I propose an economic characterization of user-contributed content, and identify contributor behavior issues critical for success. For an information service provider, these issues predict underprovision of content, inefficient mixes of quality and variety, and undesirable levels of content pollution. How might we design information services or systems to ameliorate these problems? Given the centrality of autonomous, motivated human behavior in user-contributed content problems, I argue this is a problem for incentive-centered design: how to configure economic, social and psychological incentives to induce contribution, discourage pollution, and motivate sufficient effort to generate quality? I illustrate with a few examples, including passwords and CAPTCHAs, and, for a content pollution problem loosely based on a popular Web site's experience, a stylized mechanism that relies on user-contributed (meta)content to screen out polluting contributions.
Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason is Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, a professor in the School of Information, a professor in the School of Public Policy, and a professor in the Department of Economics. He was also the founding director of the Program for Research on the Information Economy at U-M and is the founder and director of the Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions (STIET) doctoral fellowship program.
MacKie-Mason is well known for his pioneering work on the economics of the Internet. He also works on the economics of other information technologies and of competition in high-technology markets. His recent work focuses on the economics of information content and usage, including projects on spam reduction, peer-to-peer resource sharing, and incentives to increase information security. He was the research director for the first large-scale field experiment on electronic commerce for electronic access to scholarly journals (PEAK).
He has consulted to AT&T, Sun Microsystems, America OnLine, EDS, Bell Atlantic, Intergraph, GTE, Compuware, SBC, and other information technology companies.
He has also advised the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, and other government agencies. His publications appear in scholarly journals in the areas of economics, computer science, and library science, reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of his research.
His teaching includes courses on information policy, the economics of information, information in choice and learning, and antitrust.
More information is available at http://jeff-mason.com/index.php
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| draft of article.pdf | 507.9 KB |
| 3/27 talk slides with speaker notes pdf | 4.64 MB |
