The EconCS group at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences draws on methodologies from AI, multi-agent systems, computer science theory, microeconomic theory, optimization and distributed systems.

We are interested in electronic auctions, mechanisms and markets, peer production and social computing, and in the constructive use of economic methodologies within computational systems.

A central challenge is to resolve conflicts between game-theoretic and computational constraints.

Current Topics of Interest

• incentive-based environment design
• dynamic mechanisms
• the design of mechanism infrastructures and currencies for distributed and peer-to-peer systems
• preference elicitation
• information aggregation
• applications to e-commerce and social computing
• cryptographically secure auctions
• network formation games

News

• Benjamin Lubin has been awarded a Siebel Scholarship (9/2009)
  
• "Quantifying the Strategyproofness of Mechanisms via Metrics on Payoff
  Distributions", by Benjamin Lubin and David C. Parkes, will be presented
  at the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (5/2009)
• Congratulations to new PhDs, David Chen, Florin Constantin and Katy Milkman (5/2009)
• Congratulations to Haoqi Zhang, a recipient of the 'Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates', awarded to 5 graduate students in GSAS (4/2009)
• "Self-Correcting Sampling-Based Dynamic Multi-Unit Auctions" by
  Florin Constantin and David Parkes will be presented at the 10th ACM Electronic Commerce Conference (4/2009)
  
• "Policy Teaching Through Reward Function Learning" by Haoqi Zhang, David Parkes and Yiling Chen will be presented at the 10th ACM Electronic Commerce Conference (4/2009)
  
• "Designing Incentives for Online Question and Answers Forums" by Shaili Jain, Yiling Chen and David Parkes will be presented at the 10th ACM Electronic Commerce Conference (4/2009)
  
• "A General Approach to Environment Design with One Agent" by  Haoqi Zhang, Yiling Chen and David Parkes will appear at the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09) (4/2009)
• "Expressive Power-Based Resource Allocation for Data Centers" by Benjamin Lubin, David Parkes, Jeff Kephart and Rajarshi Das will appear at the Twenty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09) (4/2009)
  
• Congratulations to new PhDs, Jeffrey Shneidman and Laura Kang (3/2009)
• Congratulations to Katy Milkman, who will join the Operations and Information Management Department at The Wharton School as an Assistant Professor in Fall'09 (3/2009)
•  Congratulations to Sven Seuken, who has been awarded a prestigious Microsoft Graduate Fellowship (3/2009)
• Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar on Cooperation and Human Systems, March 26-28, 2009 (3/2009)