Jon Kleinberg: "Rewards, Badges, and Incentives"

Date: 

Wednesday, March 13, 2013, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Maxwell Dworkin G115

Special CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: WEDNESDAY, March 13, 2013
Time: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin G115

Speaker: Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University

Title: Rewards, Badges, and Incentives

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 on-line social media sites through the use of badges and other reward systems. We consider several aspects of the interaction between rewards and incentives, including a framework for reasoning about on-line user behavior in the presence of badges, and some reflections on the incentives produced by the allocation of credit in a simple model of a scientific community.

The talk will be based on joint work with Ashton Anderson, Dan Huttenlocher, Jure Leskovec, and Sigal Oren.

Bio sketch: Jon Kleinberg is the Tisch University Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science 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. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences; he is the recipient of research fellowships from the MacArthur, Packard, Simons, and Sloan Foundations, as well as awards including the Nevanlinna Prize, the Lanchester Prize, and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.