Incentives for Collective Behavior: Badges, Procrastination, and Long-Range Goals
Jon Kleinberg (Cornell University)
CSE Distinguished Lecture Series joint with campus-wide Data Science Seminar
Thursday, January 15, 2015, 3:30pm
EEB-105
Abstract
Many systems involve the allocation of rewards for achievements, and these rewards produce a set of incentives that in turn guide behavior. Such effects are visible in many domains from everyday life, and they are increasingly forming a designed aspect of participatory on-line sites through the use of badges and other reward systems. We consider several aspects of the interaction between rewards and incentives in the context of collective effort, including a method for reasoning about on-line user activity in the presence of badges, and a graph-theoretic framework for analyzing procrastination and other forms of behavior that are inconsistent over time.
The talk will be based on joint work with Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jure Leskovec, and Sigal Oren.
Bio
Professor Kleinberg is a professor at Cornell University. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. His work has been supported by an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Simons Investigator Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and grants from Google, Yahoo!, and the NSF. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.