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

• Congratulations to Andrew Mao who is a winner of the 2011 Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Program. (5/2011)
• Congratulations to Ariel Procaccia and Felix Fischer for their best paper award at TARK 2011 for their paper "Sum of Us:  Strategyproof Selection from the Selectors" with Noga Alon and Moshe Tennenholtz. (4/2011)
  
• Congratulations to John Lai who has been awarded a National Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. (4/2011)
  
• Congratulations to Scott Kominers who has been awarded a two-year Postdoctoral Scholarship at Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago. (3/2011)
  
• Congratulations to Shaili Jain who was awarded a CI Fellowship for postdoctoral study at Yale University. (7/2010)
  

• Congratulations to Jenn Wortman Vaughan is starting a new position as an Assistant Professor in UCLA's Computer Science Department this fall. (7/2010)
  

• EconCS group kicked off the 2010 summer conference season with more than 17 accepted papers, including 1 paper at CHI'10, 2 papers at AAMAS'10, 5 papers at EC'10, 1 paper at UAI'10, 7 papers at AAAI'2010, and 1 paper at ECAI'10.
  

• Congratulations to Brett Harrison and Jeff Nanney on receiving the Hoopes Prize for outstanding academic research work. (5/2010)

• Congratulations to Alice Gao on receiving a Canadian NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship (3/2010)
  
• Congratulations to Yiling Chen on receiving her NSF CAREER Award (1/2010)

• Congratulations to Scott Kominers who won the Morgan Prize Award

• "Betting on the Real Line" by Xi (Alice) Gao, Yiling Chen, and David Pennock is presented at the 5th Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE'09) (12/2009)
• "Gaming Dynamic Parimutuel Markets" by Qianya Lin and Yiling Chen is presented at the 5th Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE'09) (12/2009)

• Benjamin Lubin has been awarded a Siebel Scholarship (9/2009)