I am the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of Information, University of Michigan. In real life, I am the Arthur W. Burks Professor of Information and Computer Science, and a Professor of Economics and Public Policy. I was also the founding Director of STIET (a research program for Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions) at Michigan, but when I became Assoc. Dean I turned over the Directorship to my colleague, Prof. Yan Chen.
My research and teaching are a mix of mostly economics with some computer science, and a bit of psychology (cognitive, and increasingly social), addressing principles of design and performance for information technologies and digital information content. Recently I started to focus on incentive-centered design -- design of information systems and services that takes into account the behavior of autonomous, motivated and often strategic humans. I also do a fair bit of work on competition policy and antitrust, especially for technology-related industries. In the past I have worked on taxation and corporate behavior, and public utility pricing.
The advent of the web has led to a recent explosion in bibliometrics to measure scholarly impact. I obtained the following calculations for "MacKie-Mason" on 23 July 2007:
- h index: 28
- g index: 61
- Erdős number: 4
Notes: The h and g indices were calculated using version 2.5.3171 of Harzing's Publish or Perish, on the Google Scholar database, with author=mackie-mason (a unique identifier on Google Scholar last I checked). See Reflections on Google Scholar on using this source for scholarly bibliometrics. My Erdős number is achieved through the following sequence of co-authorship links: Erdős -> Daniel J. Kleitman -> Rakesh Vinay Vohra -> Michael P. Wellman. (I also have a completely different 5-path: Erdős -> George Piranian -> Charles Titus -> Carl Simon -> Ted Bergstrom.)