Report to NSF on CS/ECON

Larry Blume, David Easley, Jon Kleinberg, Eva Tardos, and Ehud Kalai, who organized last year an NSF-supported conference on “Research Issues at the Interface of Computer Science and Economics“, just put out a report to NSF about it:

This report follows up on the workshop by surveying some of the key issues that were identied at the interface of computer science and economics research, both in the planning and organization of the workshop, and particularly in the talks and discussion that took place during and after the workshop. We organize these into a set of underlying principles that can help guide interdisciplinary research in this area (developed in Section 2), followed by a set of key applications (developed in Section 3) that can benefit from the exploration of these principles.

It is often that writing to funding agencies forces us to elucidate our basic scientific motivations in a way that we do not normally bother doing.  Not everyone will agree with these, of course, and definitely the strategic aspects of writing the report should be acknowledged, but, when done well, some essence of the field is captured, as is the case here, I think.

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