Conferences and Projects

Organizations and Conferences

I support and actively participate in the following organizations and conferences:

STIET

I created the Program for Research on the Information Economy at the University of Michigan in about 1995. This was a multidisciplinary research program that included faculty and graduate students from several departments. We expanded and changed the name to STIET (Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions) in 2001, when we received our first NSF IGERT grant (a $3 million training grant to support doctoral students). I have been the Program Director of PRIE and STIET from the beginning. As of 2007 we have provided doctoral fellowship support to more than 35 students, and engaged the collaborative multidisciplinary research of over a 20 faculty members from five different schools and colleges at the University of Michigan and four departments at Wayne State University. We received an additional $5 million in funding in 2007 ($3 million from NSF and $2 million from UM and WSU).

ICD

I am one of the founding core faculty of the Incentive-Centered Design (ICD) research group at the School of Information. This group teaches a Master's degree specialization at SI, and organizes the related research programs of about four faculty members more than a dozen doctoral and master's students in SI. There is a larger ICD community at the University of Michigan, including faculty in Computer Science and in Economics, organized under the STIET program.

ACM SIGecom

I helped found this SIG in 1999. I have been on the Advisory Board since.

ACM Electronic Commerce

I helped found this conference in 1998-99. I have since served as Program Co-Chair (2000), Local Arrangements Co-Chair (2006) and General Chair (2007).

Telecom Policy Research Conference (TPRC)

I was Program Chair for the 25th Annual conference, and then served for three years on the Board of Directors for the Telecom Policy Research Conference. I have maintained the website since about 2000.

Research Projects

Some of the research projects I've been affiliated with over the years:

DEXTER

In DEXTER we are investigating the design of computational markets for allocating resources over time, that is, problems involving scheduling. The project started in September 2000 with the support of the National Science Foundation grant number IIS-9988715. With our second National Science Foundation grant (IIS-0414710, 2005-2008) we have focused on developing an empirical game theoretic methodology for analyzing intractable games.

Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge (PEAK)

In the late 1990s, we undertook a 1.5 year experimental service for priced electronic journal delivery. Through the University of Michigan Library Digital Production Service we provided access to several years of more than 1,100 Elsevier Science journals, to 11 participating libraries. This was the first wide-scale, large-volume commercial digital scholarly journal delivery service in the U.S. This project was a field experiment, and we conducted several studies of the results. We convened a conference to report the main results of PEAK. Numerous scholars presented their research on other digital library projects; a 17-chapter book reporting on a wide array of early digital library projects is available at the link above.

See the retired project web site.

Strategic Positioning in Information Product Space (SPIPS)

We are interested in how agents in such an economy can form or locate niche markets, rather than competing for the mass market, and in identifying the conditions needed for niches to appeal to producers.